The number of billionaires internationally has increased significantly, in part owing to the rise of AI.
There were 3,302 billionaires (in US dollar terms) as of April 2026, which is an increase of 383, or 13.1 per cent, from the same time last year, according to UBS’s 2026 Global Wealth Report.
The US is home to more than 1,000 billionaires, which is almost double the 562 billionaires in mainland China. In third place is India, which has 211 billionaires among its population of over 1.4 billion.
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As well as growing in overall numbers, billionaires’ level of wealth rose by 25 per cent between April 2025 and 2026.
South Korea went from having 31 billionaires in 2025 to 52 in 2026, in part owing to the country’s booming semiconductor and AI microchip industries. The overall net worth of South Korea’s billionaire population doubled across the same time period, suggesting that most existing billionaires saw their wealth preserved, if not also grow.
The number of millionaires has also risen – there were more people with a net worth of $1 million globally in 2025 compared with 2024, according to the report, which estimated that there are roughly 57.5 million millionaires in the world.
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The world’s millionaire population grew by 1.5 per cent from 2024 to 2025, which represents almost one million people with seven-figure fortunes. Furthermore, of the 56 markets surveyed by UBS, none of them ended 2025 with fewer millionaires than they had at the beginning.
In line with the high number of billionaires, the US saw the largest increase in the number of millionaires in 2025, with 440,000 new people earning the title. Over 40 per cent of the world’s millionaires live in the US, amounting to around 23.6 million people.
In the UK there were over 43,000 new millionaires last year, although it should be noted that not all of these people would qualify as millionaires in sterling due to the conversion rate. Fifteen million millionaires reside in Western Europe overall.
The number of millionaires in a country is not necessarily reflective of its economic strength, the report said. A person’s wealth can be determined by factors such as home ownership – for example, a person in the UK could own a home worth over $1 million without debt attached to it, but not have that in liquid assets, and would still be considered a net-worth millionaire.
While AI has been one reason for the growth of many UHNWs’ fortunes, a myriad of factors can lead to a person’s wealth growing, noted Paul Donovan, chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management.
‘Wealth creation is the reward for hard work (productivity) or taking investment risks – but at times of structural upheaval, wealth may also be created by the luck of being in the right place at the right time,’ he said.
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