Soaring Energy Demand Mints China’s Newest Billionaire

The surging demand for energy to fuel the AI boom has boosted shares of energy storage maker Beijing HyperStrong Technology by almost 500% so far this year, and catapulted the company’s founder, Zhang Jianhui, into the billionaire ranks.

The 47-year-old, who is HyperStrong’s chairman and CEO, amassed a fortune of $2.1 billion that is largely based on his stake in the Shanghai-listed company, according to Forbes estimates. His wife Xu Rui, also 47, is vice manager at the company and indirectly holds a 1.1% company stake through an investment vehicle, according to stock exchange filings. Her shares are worth about 746 million yuan (about $105 million).

HyperStrong is benefiting from a burgeoning market for its products as development of AI-related technologies leads to soaring energy demand, Shen Meng, Beijing-based managing director of boutique investment bank Chanson & Co., says by WeChat.

Shen adds that HyperStrong is also riding on the country’s renewable energy boom. As Beijing pushes for further uses of green energy, extra wind or solar output needs to be stored so electricity can be released into power grids when needed. “The company is supported by multiple factors related to the energy and tech sectors,” he says.

HyperStrong didn’t respond to a request for comment. It announced on Thursday a purchase agreement with billionaire Robin Zeng’s battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL). Under the agreement, the firm will buy 200 gigawatts of batteries from CATL over the next decade to use in its energy storage systems. Shares of HyperStrong soared by its daily trading limit of 20% that day as investors took the deal as another sign of continued strong demand.

The company reported sales rose 52.2% year-on-year to 7.9 billion yuan ($1.1 billion) in the first nine months of this year, while net income jumped 98.7% to 622.6 million yuan during the same period.

In the meantime, HyperStrong has set its sights on international expansion. In February, the company announced that it will supply 5,000 units of its storage products to Singapore infrastructure firm Alpina over the next two years. In July, HyperStrong said it will work with European power firm Repono on energy storage projects that have a total capacity of 1.4 gigawatts from 2025 to 2027.

Zhang founded HyperStrong in 2011 and took it public in January this year, raising 861 million yuan on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s Nasdaq-like Science and Technology Innovation Board Star Market).

Before starting HyperStrong, Zhang was chief technology officer of Siemens’s smart grid unit in China. Previously, he worked at National Semiconductor Corp. (which got acquired by Texas Instruments in 2011) as a design engineer from 2005 to 2010. Zhang holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley.