Alexandr Wang, born in 1997, is a self-made American tech billionaire and the founder and CEO of Scale AI, a data-labeling and AI infrastructure company. His background is the epitome of technical prodigy in the digital age: he grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the highly scientific town famous for its National Laboratory, where both of his physicist parents worked.

Wang’s education in coding began remarkably early; he was coding competitively by age 13 and entered his first full-time job as a coding consultant by age 17. He briefly attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), studying Mechanical Engineering, but famously dropped out after only a year to accept a lucrative investment offer and fully commit to his startup. This precocious genius and willingness to reject traditional academia for high-stakes entrepreneurship defined his early path.

Alexandr Wang's career accelerated rapidly before he even turned 20. At 17, he worked as a coding consultant for Quora and later served as a software engineer for a short period. The defining moment came in 2016 when, at the age of 19, he co-founded Scale AI in his native San Francisco.

Wang recognized that the biggest hurdle in the AI boom was the massive, manual process of labeling and annotating data to train machine learning models. Scale AI pioneered a hybrid model combining software automation with a global human workforce to efficiently process petabytes of data for clients. His strategic foresight positioned Scale AI as critical infrastructure for the entire industry, securing massive contracts with the U.S. military, various government intelligence agencies, and tech giants. The company’s valuation soared, and by 2021, at the age of 24, Wang became the world's youngest self-made billionaire, a title earned entirely through his immense equity stake in the $7.3 billion-plus company.

Alexandr Wang’s philanthropic influence is strongly tied to his company’s ethical mission surrounding AI and his desire to support scientific and technological education.

His core contribution is providing the technical infrastructure that powers ethical and military AI applications for U.S. and allied governments, reflecting a commitment to national security through technology. Through Scale AI, Wang established programs to empower a global workforce (the network of human annotators) with flexible, digitally accessible work, providing a social benefit across numerous international communities. Furthermore, his work and public profile inspire a generation of young, technical entrepreneurs, especially given his status as a young dropout who achieved global tech dominance.