Meet the Chinese AI star who splashed a reported US$70m on a California mansion

Tony Wu Yuhuai, the China-born co-founder of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence lab, sparked discussions across Chinese social media after reportedly spending US$70 million on a six-bedroom Californian mega-mansion.

The property deal, the largest so far this year in the Bay Area, pushed the thirty-something AI star under the spotlight, alongside other Silicon Valley-based Chinese talent that has contributed to frontier AI labs from OpenAI to Meta Platforms.

Wu appeared to be the buyer of a 12-acre (4.8 hectare) estate in Hillsborough, an affluent area in California close to Silicon Valley, according to a report by The San Francisco Standard last week.

The luxury estate features a private nine-hole golf course, a 150-seat outdoor amphitheatre and a 2,100-gallon saltwater aquarium among other amenities, according to the report.

Wu, who left xAI earlier this year, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.

In 2023, Wu co-founded xAI, now renamed as SpaceXAI, after his stint at Google as a research scientist from 2021. Before that, Wu interned at OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind team as a research scientist.