A 46-year-old mathematician named in the top 10 richest list by AI

  It's the first time in the history of the world.

We have just seen the British people who make the most money with AI!

According to the latest Sunday Times Rich List 2026, 46-year-old Alex Gerko, a mathematics professor at Moscow State University, is the eighth richest person in the UK with a staggering fortune of £160.06 billion.

In the past year alone, his wealth has skyrocketed to 64.3 billion yuan, the equivalent of an average daily eye opening, with nearly 176 million yuan automatically drawn into his account.

His huge fortune comes from his AI quantification company, XTX Markets, which he founded in 2015.

The company has completely broken the traditional Wall Street model, with just over 250 employees, no traders in the traditional sense, and no outside investors.

Their "printers", a purely AI trading system with over 400PB of global financial market data, are powered by GPU clusters.

XTX has quickly become one of the UK's most profitable private companies, with Gerko alone holding the largest fortune cookie as the absolute controller of about 75% of the company's shares.

AI automated trading is disrupting traditional finance.

Born in the suburbs of Russia, Gerko graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at the renowned Moscow State University with a Ph.D. in mathematics.

The Russian school's mathematical training is noted for its solid, rigorous, hard core. In his understanding, the nature of the world is not basics, but probability, distribution and random differential equations.

After completing his PhD, Gerko worked at Deutsche Bank and GSA Capital, a hedge fund.

It was during this time that Gerko saw through the deadly weakness of traditional trade: humans.

Humans have emotions, fear, and greed; human reactions have physical limits; humans cannot process thousands of variables in their brains at once.

So in 2015, Gerko decided to stand alone and foundedXTX Markets.

The company's core philosophy is very extreme: to unite all human traders to "clean up".

XTX built a purely profitable AI trading system.

The company has more than 250 employees, the vast majority of whom are algorithm engineers, data scientists, and underlying hardware poachers, without any traditional definition of "discovery".

In the past, the global financial market was like a huge casino, where the average investor was a gambler, and the market maker was someone who stood at the table and offered a chip exchange at any time.

Market trading is not about the profits after a setback, but about the gap between the buy and sell price, i.e. the difference in the buy and sell price in financial terms.

Each transaction may make a small profit, but it can turn out surprisingly profitable if more is added.

Of course, this is not a permanent loss.

The biggest risk of being a marketer is that the market suddenly goes crazy in one direction. For example, a stock market crash, everyone is in a hurry to sell, but marketers have lost a lot of assets.

In the past, the business relied heavily on top traders who needed to constantly adjust bids, control inventories, and hedge risk.

But Gerko completely removed human traders from trading decisions, leaving machines to take over the entire trading process.

Mathematical models, machine learning and automated trading systems have replaced human experience with intuition. Offerings, orders, risk management, hedging execution are all dominated by algorithmic systems.

"In the face of real mathematics and algorithms, what human traders call 'discovery', 'experience' and 'intuition' lags behind like medieval astrology".

AtXTX Markets, read as X-Transpose-X, it is filled with a fervent belief in pure mathematics.

In the financial world, XTX Markets is a "different class".

First of all, this is a zero-tradition trader.

Going into XTX, all buying and selling, microsecond imaging, risk hedging, is 100% AI deep learning model independent decision-making.

The company does not employ any traditional handlers. More than 70% of its employees are mathematicians, cryptologists, machine learning experts and underlying architectural engineers.

The only mission of human employees at XTX is to write higher-dimensional mathematical formulas, modulate neural network models, and maintain computational infrastructure.

What's more, they don't serve the gold master, they're completely zero external funds.

Wall Street's billionaires mostly depend on managing other people's money, collecting management fees. But XTX refuses any external funding. They only kill with their real money and silver, so every penny they make belongs to the team, not to any Wall Street giant.

At the XTX Markets headquarters in London, there is a replica of the Apollo 11 command cylinder, as well as an authentic 1943 Enigma encryption machine.

250 people, making tens of billions of dollars a year in net profits.

So how does XTX achieve 170 million solar masses?

XTX has built a huge GPU cluster to drive AI trading systems.

It is revealed that XTX has one of the largest private GPU clusters in the financial transaction sector, including over 25,000 GPUs (including 10,000 A100s and 10,000 V100s), as well as up to 650PB of available ultra-high-speed storage!

Every day, this super monster processes more than a trillion data points!

From the tiny jumps in the global order book to the variety of tick data and emotional signals, all underneath the ingestion of deep learning models.

XTX stores bulk transaction data from global financial markets for decades. With each transaction, each price jumps. There is also a slightly transient link between foreign exchange, gold, crude oil, U.S. bonds, and equities.

These numbers are messy in the eyes of humans, but they are a huge gold mine in the eyes of AI.

Traditional traders look at the market and see greed, fear and human gambling. XTX's AI looks at the market and sees a changing world of high-dimensional probability.

Each tiny signal may conceal a chance to make money, and GPU clusters extract these signals from the bulk of the noise and then execute purchases and sales in a few milliseconds.

XTX's daily trading volume in the stock, foreign exchange, fixed income, commodity and cryptocurrency markets has surpassed a staggering $250 billion!

In order to support the huge demand for computing,XTX made a surprising decision: not to lease cloud servers, but to build its own data center!

Unlike many financial institutions that rely on the public cloud,XTX understands that cloud services have "links" and resource seizures.

As a result, XTX built a 478-acre super data center park with a capacity of up to 22.5 megawatts. The first 150,000-square-meter data center to be built was designed to carry up to 22.5 megawatts.

In this way, XTX can perform accurate model reviews and hyperparametric optimizations without being harassed by anyone.

Mathematics is wealth, data is a river of defence.

What will Gerko do if he spends a few tons of money?

The PhD in Mathematics wishes to counter nursing mathematics.

Gerko had a passion for mathematics and polar culture. His investment firm, called "Cromulon Capital", was named after an alien deity race in Zürich and Mötetien.

Over the past three years, Gerko andXTX Markets have committed more than $50 million to open source projects in mathematical AI.

In early 2024, XTX set up the instant "AIMO Award", a $10 million reward for the world's first AI model to win gold at IMO.

However, AI is evolving at a much faster pace than expected!

By 2026, XTX says it has decided to end the AIMO Grand Prix. The reason is that the capabilities of advanced AI models are improving too quickly! From overturning unit distance speculation, to automated formalization of the "Femata theorem", and to open source models that easily score on the topic of O-numbers, AI has entered the deep water zone.

Gerko subsequently announced a series of major funding schemes: raising $10 million to Lean FRO; raising another $10 million to the Mathlib Initiative; and funding for SAIR, founded by Tao Zedong and others.

Gerko, a Ph.D. student at the University of Moscow, is still a "mathematical fundamentalist".

He used the financial market as a cash machine to pull out hundreds of billions of dollars.

And using these enrichments as fuel will push AI to continue to test the boundaries of human logic.