People are getting rich from AI at every level of the economy, but the biggest money goes to the companies behind the companies: ASML, TSMC and Nvidia, which supply the chips every AI business depends on. There is a modern-age gold rush happening right now, and someone, somewhere, is making a lot of money from it. Even the dot-ai web domain is part of it: the country code belongs to Anguilla, a tiny Caribbean island that has made millions selling domain names to startups.
This article goes level by level: everyday workers, freelancers, one-person businesses, vibe coders, AI-first startups, base model builders, and the three companies at the bottom of the stack.
Watch the full video here, or skip to the breakdown below.
The AI gold rush at a glance
- The worker: AI as the new baseline
- The freelancer: more clients, same quality
- The one-person business
- Vibe coding: sell the shovels
- AI as the product itself
- The base models: the electricity of the AI city
- The companies behind the companies: ASML, TSMC and Nvidia
1. The worker: AI as the new baseline
Not everyone building wealth with AI is launching a startup. Some people are just doing their jobs better than they could before. A marketing agency employee who writes ad ideas, presentations and endless emails can now do it in seconds with ChatGPT, probably at better quality.
The video is blunt about what that means: for 99% of people, this is not a path to getting rich, it is what you have to do to keep your job. AI has shifted the baseline. The person next to you is working smarter and five times faster, so doing the same work at the same speed as last year already means falling behind. If you are not plugging AI into your workflow, you are simply not relevant anymore.
Being good at your job is no longer enough once the baseline has moved.
2. The freelancer: more clients, same quality
People who control their own income get a bigger advantage. Two years ago a freelance web developer asked for a new feature had to sort through documentation, write the code from scratch, troubleshoot every bug and test everything. A simple update could take days or weeks.
Now they describe what they need to a coding tool like GitHub Copilot in plain language, and it generates the code. Instead of juggling two clients, they can handle ten without sacrificing quality, using tools others are still sleeping on. For freelancers, consultants and solo builders, AI is a way to scale output, deliver more value and earn far more.
3. The one-person business
The base of the pyramid is the one-person business, where a single founder uses ten tools that work like employees. A few years ago a fitness coach might have had a dozen clients, with every task depending on them personally: answering questions, writing reports, chasing follow-ups and onboarding new clients by hand.
Now the marketing side runs on AI that writes personalized outreach emails, builds content calendars, drafts newsletters and turns long videos into dozens of short clips. On operations, AI tracks client data in real time, flags issues early, generates progress reports and predicts which clients are falling off and which offers convert best. For service delivery, the coach has an AI agent trained on their own knowledge base so clients get answers around the clock, and reports are drafted and sent automatically.
The advantage used to belong to companies with money to hire, and AI has erased that gap. It is about stacking the right tools, not staff or scale: one founder, ten automations, infinite reach.
The founders who see this are using an edge most businesses do not know exists.
4. Vibe coding: sell the shovels
The old saying goes that in a gold rush you should not dig for gold but sell the shovels. For a long time, making money in tech meant raising funds, hiring engineers and spending months or years building a product. Today people do something called vibe coding. With tools like Cursor, Windsurf or Lovable, you describe what you want and build an app without writing a line of code.
A solo developer can build a tool that transcribes a YouTube video, cuts it into short clips and adds captions, emojis and animations. A fitness coach can build a workout tracker around their own training and nutrition philosophy. A financial advisor can build a tool that gives users a wealth score based on income, savings, lifestyle and habits.
You do not need investors, a team or coding skills. You need to spot a problem, stitch together a solution and ship it. These are not complex businesses but single-purpose tools solving narrow problems very efficiently, and they run themselves.
5. AI as the product itself
The next tier goes beyond using AI to build an app. It builds AI into the foundation of the product. Rewind builds memory tools that record and organize everything you have seen, said or heard on your computer so you can search it like Google for your brain. Runway lets creators produce complex visual effects and edits through simple text commands.
Here AI is not how the product was built, it is the product. These companies train their own models and collect unique data, and they build foundations other businesses will depend on. That means they help set the rules for how the rest of us work, create and interact. The video calls them the seeds of the next wave of tech giants, which is why investors are flooding in.
6. The base models: the electricity of the AI city
What if you sold the machines that make the shovels? That is the tier of companies building the AI itself. Google is building Gemini into Docs, Sheets, Gmail and Search. Anthropic is building Claude as a safer, more aligned model that excels at math and coding. OpenAI started the revolution with ChatGPT, and what 99% of people think of as AI is often someone plugging into one of its base models.
These companies do not solve niche problems like video editing or customer service. They build infrastructure, optimize hardware, align models and sign billion-dollar licensing deals, creating general-purpose intelligence that everyone else builds on top of. If the AI economy is a city, they are the electricity: no matter what building you put up, you still pay the power bill. Whoever controls the base model controls the ecosystem.
That is why money is pouring into this layer like nothing seen before.
7. The companies behind the companies: ASML, TSMC and Nvidia
The people making the most money sit one layer lower. Someone has to supply computing power, run factories and design the chips. ASML is a Dutch company with a monopoly on the most advanced machine in the world, an ultraviolet lithography system, essentially a giant laser that carves billions of transistors onto chips only a few atoms wide. Each machine costs over $200 million, takes years to build and relies on a network of 5,000 suppliers. ASML is the only company that knows how to make them, so no ASML means no chips, and no chips means no AI.
TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, is ASML’s biggest client. It does not invent chips but mass-produces them for Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Google and others, better than anyone. If ASML makes the equipment, TSMC runs the mine, and it is the most profitable mine in tech. In 2024 alone TSMC cleared over $35 billion in profit, and if it stops, the entire industry shuts down.
Nvidia started by building GPUs for gamers, but those chips could process massive amounts of data in parallel, exactly what companies like OpenAI need. Its chips, like the H100, are the backbone of AI training: ChatGPT, Google and Meta all rely on them, and Musk’s Grok 3 was trained on 200,000 or more Nvidia chips in a single run. Nvidia’s market cap recently crossed $3 trillion because everyone else needs its chips to be part of the future.
ASML owns the light that etches the chips, TSMC owns the factories that scale them, and Nvidia owns the power that runs the system.
The real money is in the ground you dig on
In the AI gold rush, everyone is chasing the gold. The ones making the real money are not digging or even selling shovels. They are building the ground you dig on, and they collect their share no matter who wins.
The practical takeaway at every level is the same: the world is moving faster than ever, and the people who plug these tools into how they work, build or invest are the ones who do not get left behind.
FAQ
How is AI making people rich?
At every level of the economy: workers keep up with AI productivity, freelancers take on more clients, solo founders run businesses on automations, and vibe coders ship apps without teams. The largest profits go to the companies supplying the chips.
What is vibe coding?
It means building an app by describing what you want to a tool like Cursor, Windsurf or Lovable, without writing code yourself. The video says you only need to spot a problem, stitch together a solution and ship it.
Which companies make the most money from AI?
The video points to ASML, TSMC and Nvidia. ASML makes the lithography machines, TSMC manufactures the chips, and Nvidia designs the GPUs that train most major models.
Why is ASML so important to AI?
It is the only company that knows how to make the ultraviolet lithography systems that carve transistors onto advanced chips. Each costs over $200 million, and without them there would be no advanced chips.
Can one person run a business with AI?
Yes. The video describes a solo fitness coach using AI for outreach, content, client tracking, reports and a round-the-clock question-answering agent, so tools replace the staff that used to be needed.
Keep reading
- 15 Mistakes Rich People Make That Make Them Miserable
- 10 Habits That Help Rich People Make More Money Than You
- 15 Things Poor People Don’t Know About Making Money
