At the age of 41, he became the richest man in Jiangxi.

This scene hardly comes as a surprise.

In the recently released 2026 Hurun China Rich List, a figure stands out impressively — Chen Tianshi, founder of Cambricon. With a personal fortune of 205 billion yuan, he becomes the first entrepreneur of Jiangxi origin to break into the top 10 of the list.

41 years old this year, Chen Tianshi is a native of Nanchang, Jiangxi Province. In his early years, he and his elder brother Chen Yunji joined the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences one after another, devoting themselves to the R&D of AI chips, which laid the groundwork for the founding of Cambricon. Up to now, Cambricon has gone through a full decade. It once fell into a trough in the middle of the period, until the explosion of computing power demand brought the legend of "King Han" into being, and its market value once exceeded 1 trillion yuan this year.

Looking from this perspective, a growing number of young tech entrepreneurs are rewriting China's wealth landscape.

41 Years Old, Native of Jiangxi 

At the Helm of a Company with 550 Billion Yuan Market Value 

The story of Cambricon is full of legendary colors.

Let's start with a pair of top student brothers from Jiangxi — Chen Yunji and Chen Tianshi. Both were born in Nanchang, Jiangxi, with almost identical growth paths. They both attended the Special Class for Young Talents of University of Science and Technology of China, and worked as researchers at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences after graduating with doctorate degrees.

At the end of 2010, during an internal report at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, brothers Chen Yunji and Chen Tianshi put forward the idea of developing AI chips — to carry out interdisciplinary research integrating artificial intelligence and chip design. This idea was no different from a fantasy, because NVIDIA at that time was just a company selling game graphics cards.

Recalling those R&D years, Chen Yunji once said with emotion: "We moved forward alone in this unpopular interdisciplinary direction that was not recognized by the academic circle, ignored by the industry, difficult to publish papers and apply for projects, just groping in the dark, not knowing where the direction was, where the exit was, or even whether there was an exit at all."

It was not until 2015 that this team of only 20 people developed the world's first prototype chip dedicated to deep learning. Then in 2016, the founding members of Cambricon and Zhongke Suanyuan, the investment management platform under the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, jointly established Beijing Zhongke Cambricon Technology Co., Ltd., with Chen Tianshi serving as chairman and general manager.

In September 2017, Huawei launched the AI mobile chip "Kirin 970", which was equipped with the Cambricon-1A processor, making the latter rise to fame overnight. The milestone came in July 2020 — Cambricon was successfully listed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board, with a market value exceeding 100 billion yuan on the first trading day. Only 4 years after its establishment, Cambricon became a company with a market value of 100 billion yuan, with a stunning start.

However, after going public, Cambricon ushered in a long period of trough. Troubled by persistent losses, its stock price began a downward trend for nearly two years, and even fell to 46.59 yuan per share in April 2022, a drop of more than 80% compared with the previous high.

Such a dismal performance once triggered widespread doubts from the outside world: Is Cambricon about to collapse? The team's dream of developing domestic AI chips seemed to be on the verge of shattering at that moment.

The turning point of fate came in 2024.

In this year, Cambricon's Siyuan 590 chip came out. It is a domestic chip adopting 7nm process, whose energy efficiency ratio in inference scenarios can match that of international giants, and it supports almost all mainstream domestic large models. Against the background of the international situation, the value of Cambricon as a "domestic alternative to NVIDIA" began to be rediscovered by the market.

Following that, Cambricon's stock price embarked on a skyrocketing track, and it became the first stock with a market value of 1 trillion yuan on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board by the end of June this year. Despite a round of correction, its current market value still exceeds 550 billion yuan.

Thanks to this, Chen Tianshi's personal wealth has also risen sharply. The equity structure shows that Chen Tianshi currently directly holds 28.32% of Cambricon's shares, corresponding to a market value of nearly 160 billion yuan. There is no doubt that Chen Tianshi and Cambricon have staged a story of defying fate and achieving a counterattack.

The New Wealthy Figures from Jiangxi 

Through this scene, a group of new tech upstarts of Jiangxi origin have come to the forefront.

Before that, the richest man in Jiangxi was Luo Yuhao, co-founder of miHoYo. In the autumn of 2005, this 16-year-old teenager from Linchuan, Fuzhou, Jiangxi came to Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he met Cai Haoyu and Liu Wei. The three founded miHoYo in 2011. Later, miHoYo almost "dominated the market" with the game Genshin Impact. On the Hurun China Rich List released in October 2024, Luo Yuhao became the new richest man in Jiangxi with a fortune of 38 billion yuan.

There is also a post-90s generation from Ji'an, Jiangxi — Peng Zhihui. He obtained his bachelor's and master's degrees from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and is also Zhihui Jun, a Bilibili UP owner with 2.7 million fans. After graduation, he was selected into Huawei's "Genius Youth Program". Until the end of 2022, he left Huawei to engage in robot entrepreneurship, joined Agibot, and served as its president and CTO. Now, he is also the chairman of Sunwe New Materials, a listed company under Agibot.

Sorting out along the AI industrial chain, more entrepreneurs of Jiangxi origin are being noticed.

TFC, whose market value once exceeded 400 billion yuan this year, is also led by a native of Jiangxi — Zou Zhinong. Born into a rural family in Jiangxi, Zou Zhinong graduated from Jilin University of Technology with a bachelor's degree. In 2005, after years of experience in the manufacturing industry, he founded TFC, breaking the monopoly of foreign enterprises with a tiny ceramic ferrule. Now, riding the boom of AI computing power, Zou Zhinong has also been listed on the rich list with TFC's business territory.

Behind the storage giant Longsys, there is also a pair of twin siblings from Jiangxi — Cai Huabo and Cai Lijiang. In the 1990s, Cai Huabo traveled alone from his hometown Jiujiang, Jiangxi to Shenzhen to seek development, starting as an electronic component salesman in Huaqiangbei. Later, he invited his sister Cai Lijiang to found Longsys in Shenzhen. Starting from storage chip trading, Longsys rose to become one of the "Five Storage Tigers" in Shenzhen, with the latest market value of nearly 100 billion yuan.

Not only that, a number of well-known veterans in the technology circle are also from Jiangxi: Liang Rubo, a native of Yichun, Jiangxi, co-founder and CEO of ByteDance; Cheng Wei, a native of Shangrao, Jiangxi, founder of Didi Chuxing; and Yu Kai, a native of Nanchang, Jiangxi, at the helm of leading autonomous driving enterprise Horizon Robotics... To a certain extent, a group of people from Jiangxi are changing China's technology landscape.

Epitome of the Industry 

Young Chinese People Are Flooding the Rich List 

Stories similar to Chen Tianshi's are on the rise.

It is still fresh in our memory that in August this year, Unitree Robotics was listed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board, becoming the "first humanoid robot stock" in A-share market. On the listing day, its market value once exceeded 400 billion yuan, and its founder Wang Xingxing became the richest post-90s generation on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board. Although Unitree Robotics' stock price experienced a roller coaster ride afterwards, it has surged for 7 consecutive trading days recently, and its market value is approaching 300 billion yuan again.

The most impressive scene is undoubtedly DeepSeek, which created the largest AI financing in China. In the first half of this year, DeepSeek's first round of financing was announced, with a post-investment valuation as high as 350 billion yuan; by October this year, the second round of financing is nearing completion, with a reported astonishing scale of 1 trillion yuan, and its valuation has exceeded 600 billion yuan, while preparing for Sci-Tech Innovation Board IPO at the same time.

The 41-year-old Liang Wenfeng, founder and largest single shareholder of DeepSeek, also appeared on the 2026 Hurun China Rich List. He made his debut on the list with a fortune of 280 billion yuan, ranking seventh. Besides Liang Wenfeng, there are three other newly listed entrepreneurs from DeepSeek — Zheng Dawei, Li Huan and Chen Zhe.

Looking around, there are many such faces: Yang Zhilin of Moonshot AI, Yan Junjie of MiniMax, Liu Jingkang of Insta360, Wang He of Galaxy Universal, Zeng Guoyang of FaceMind, Hu Yuanming of Meshy... They look like students, but with knowledge and technology, they founded amazing companies from scratch.

For quite a long time in the past, regulars on the rich list were mostly figures who had accumulated enough experience in the industry, active in real estate, manufacturing, consumer and other fields, whose wealth accumulation usually relied on waiting for resources and industry cycles.

But the script is different today — the youngest entrepreneurs are clustered in the most cutting-edge fields. Whether it is chips, large models or embodied intelligence, what they hold in their hands is not an ordinary business, but the ticket to the next industrial revolution. Once their technical route is verified, they can quickly complete the wealth accumulation that used to take two generations in just three to five years.

As observed by the IDG Capital team: Since the advent of ChatGPT, those truly breakthrough innovations often come from young teams. "They may still lack industry experience, but precisely because they are not bound by traditional thinking, they can quickly build technical advantages in cutting-edge fields such as AI."

The wealth creation boom set off by these new tech upstarts is exactly a spray splashed when the flow of talents and the national industrial direction intersect; under the spray is the continuous current required for the rise of emerging industries. It is precisely because of the continuous injection of these young blood that the long river of China's technological history can flow endlessly towards the distance.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account Pedaily (ID: pedaily2012), written by Liu Bo, and published with authorization from 36Kr.