Who from the Australian AI and data centre sector is on the AFR Rich List 2026?

Six names. Five debutants per the AFR’s own framing: Katrina Leslie (Swipejobs) at No. 67 with A$2.5 billion, Oliver Curtis (Firmus Technologies) at No. 146 with A$1.25 billion, Anthony Woods (Grafana Labs) at No. 194 with A$881 million, and Daniel and William Roberts (IREN) jointly at No. 200 with A$853 million. AirTrunk’s Robin Khuda carried over from 2025 at No. 109 with A$2.64 billion. All six sit inside a list of 200 Australian residents whose combined wealth is A$707 billion.

How does the AI and data centre cohort’s 2026 representation compare to 2025?

The 2025 Rich List carried one AI or data centre name: Robin Khuda. The 2026 list carries six, with five debutants from across the AI infrastructure stack. The expansion reflects a 12-month period in which Firmus secured a US$10 billion debt facility and signalled an ASX listing, IREN signed a US$3.4 billion AI cloud contract with NVIDIA and pivoted from bitcoin mining to AI cloud and data centre operations, and Swipejobs prepared its own ASX IPO at an indicative A$2 billion.

Is Robin Khuda still the wealthiest data centre principal in Australia?

Yes, on the AFR Rich List 2026’s reported numbers. Khuda’s A$2.64 billion sits above Leslie’s A$2.5 billion, Curtis’s A$1.25 billion, Woods’s A$881 million and the Roberts brothers’ combined A$853 million. Greg Boorer (CDC Data Centres) does not appear on the 2026 list under our scan, despite CDC carrying an equity value of A$13.7 billion and Boorer holding 3.66% as the largest individual shareholder. That omission is worth verifying against the AFR’s underlying methodology before treating Khuda’s position as definitive across all Australian data centre principals.

What does the 2026 Rich List tell us about Australian AI infrastructure?

It is the first year the AFR has priced five AI and data centre debutants on the list in one go, alongside Khuda’s carried-over entry. The cohort covers wholesale hyperscale (AirTrunk), liquid-first AI factory development (Firmus), vertically integrated GPU-cloud and data centre operations (IREN), AI observability tooling (Grafana Labs) and AI-enabled marketplace platforms (Swipejobs). The Atlassian markdown and Canva uplift in the same list suggest investors are separating AI-disrupted incumbents from AI-aligned platforms.

Five AI and data centre founders join the AFR Rich List 2026

At a glance

Five of the 15 debutants on the AFR Rich List 2026 made their fortunes in AI and data centres, per the AFR’s own framing.
Katrina Leslie (Swipejobs) debuts at No. 67 with A$2.5 billion, the highest-ranked new entrant on the list.
Oliver Curtis (Firmus Technologies) debuts at No. 146 with A$1.25 billion.
Anthony Woods (Grafana Labs) debuts at No. 194 with A$881 million.
Daniel and William Roberts (IREN) debut jointly at No. 200 with A$853 million.
Robin Khuda (AirTrunk) holds his 2025 place at No. 109 with A$2.64 billion, up around A$200 million on 2025.

Australia’s AI and data centre cohort makes the wealth ledger

The Australian Financial Review’s Rich List 2026 dropped at 5am yesterday, and AI and data centre fortunes account for five of the 15 debutants. That is the AFR’s own classification, set out in the acting Rich List editor Hannah Tattersall’s debutants write-up. Add Robin Khuda from AirTrunk, who carried over from 2025, and the 2026 list has six names whose wealth is tied to the AI and data centre build.

Across the top 200 there are 178 billionaires, and the combined wealth of the list now sits at A$707 billion. Mining and property provided most of the year-on-year growth. Inside the technology cohort, the AI and data centre names are the ones that moved up.

Who is on the list

Katrina Leslie, Swipejobs: No. 67, A$2.5 billion (debut)

Leslie is the highest-ranked debutant on the 2026 list. Swipejobs is an AI-enabled job search platform that Leslie founded a decade ago. The business generated A$1.3 billion in revenue in 2025 and is preparing an ASX IPO with Barrenjoey running the book at an indicative A$2 billion. Leslie sits inside the AFR’s AI cohort by source-of-wealth, although Swipejobs is an applied-AI marketplace rather than infrastructure. She is included here because the AFR’s framing of the cohort is broad enough to cover both ends of the stack.

Oliver Curtis, Firmus Technologies: No. 146, A$1.25 billion (debut)

Curtis co-founded Firmus with his cousin Tim Rosenfield in 2019. The AFR has billed the company’s planned IPO as the hottest of the year. Firmus describes its model as “dirt to token”, integrating land, power, cooling, NVIDIA GPUs and energy management across what it calls a liquid-first AI factory stack. Its Tasmanian facility was reported by the AFR as running 26,000 NVIDIA chips with 30 workers and around 15 per cent of Tasmania’s power. Curtis’s father is Nick Curtis, a mining executive who founded infrastructure consultancy BBI.

Rosenfield, the Singapore-based co-founder, does not appear on the list. The AFR ranks Australian residents.

Anthony Woods, Grafana Labs: No. 194, A$881 million (debut)

Woods is the Perth-based co-founder of Grafana Labs, the open-source observability platform. Grafana started as a data visualisation tool and is now used by AI operators including NVIDIA and Anthropic to monitor their models in production. Woods has said a float is not off the table. His Grafana entry on the Rich List is the AI-tooling counterpart to Firmus and IREN: not a data centre operator, but core infrastructure that AI operators depend on to run.

Daniel and William Roberts, IREN: No. 200, A$853 million (debut)

The Roberts brothers are former Macquarie executives. They founded IREN in 2018 as Iris Energy and Nasdaq-listed it in late 2021. The business started as bitcoin-mining infrastructure and pivoted into AI cloud as generative AI demand built, converting its data centres into AI factories and aggressively acquiring NVIDIA chips. IREN’s market capitalisation hit A$17.3 billion in 2025.

May 2026 delivered three notable IREN transactions: a US$3.4 billion five-year AI cloud contract with NVIDIA and the acquisition of Spanish developer Nostrum Group on 7 May, the Awaken acquisition on 18 May, and a Dell purchase agreement for air-cooled Blackwell systems on 26 May targeting US$4.4 billion in annualised run-rate revenue. William Roberts is 36. The brothers’ valuation reflects their combined IREN equity holdings. IREN’s Australian data centre construction is targeted from 2028.

Robin Khuda, AirTrunk: No. 109, A$2.64 billion (carried over from 2025)

Khuda was the only Australian data centre principal on the 2025 list. His 2026 ranking is up around A$200 million on 2025 and continues to reflect the Blackstone and CPPIB acquisition of AirTrunk, which closed at A$24 billion in late 2024, along with a year of follow-on activity including a US$3 billion Malaysian expansion and the proposed 1.2 GW Mamre Road campus in Western Sydney. AirTrunk also sits inside the new Data Centres Australia peak body launched in late 2025.

How 2026 compares to 2025

The 2025 Rich List, published on 30 May 2025, had one data centre name: Robin Khuda. The 2026 list has six AI and data centre names, including the five debutants flagged by the AFR.

Year	AI / DC entries	Names
2025	1	Robin Khuda (AirTrunk)
2026	6 (5 debuts + 1 carried)	Robin Khuda (AirTrunk), Katrina Leslie (Swipejobs), Oliver Curtis (Firmus), Anthony Woods (Grafana Labs), Daniel and William Roberts (IREN)

Source: Certified Strategic Editorial; AFR Rich List 2025 and 2026 reporting, May 2026.

According to the AFR, all 15 debutants together added A$18.8 billion in cumulative wealth to the top 200. The five AI and data centre debutants account for roughly A$6.7 billion of that, on the reported figures.

The wider tech context

The 2026 list’s headline tech story is the Atlassian markdown. Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes both fell sharply, with reported net worths of A$11.87 billion and A$11.76 billion respectively, roughly half of 2025 figures. The driver, per the reporting, is investor concern about AI agents emulating Atlassian’s core products, alongside Atlassian’s own announced 1,600 layoffs and pivot toward AI tooling.

Canva moved the other way. Co-founders Cliff Obrecht and Melanie Perkins sit at No. 6 with a combined A$17.56 billion. The composition of the top tech ranks rearranged around AI exposure: the AI-disrupted incumbents fell, the AI-aligned platform operators climbed.

The AI and data centre cohort sits inside the second group. The 2026 list is the first time that distinction has been priced into the personal net worth of Australian operators, alongside the underlying company multiples Certified Strategic has tracked across Firmus, NEXTDC and the broader neocloud cohort.

What to watch

The Firmus IPO window. The AFR has labelled it the hottest IPO of 2026. A successful float at the indicative range would crystallise Curtis’s paper position and likely add Rosenfield to a future list if he relocates or if the AFR adjusts its source-of-wealth treatment.

IREN’s Australian build-out. The company has flagged Australian data centre operations targeted from 2028. The first announced Australian site would convert IREN from a Sydney-headquartered offshore-listed operator into a domestic developer with disclosed local megawatts.

AirTrunk’s Mamre Road approval pathway. A 1.2 GW campus would be Australia’s first to cross the gigawatt mark and would re-anchor Khuda’s 2027 ranking against an Australian asset rather than the 2024 Blackstone proceeds.

Swipejobs and Grafana liquidity events. A Swipejobs ASX listing and a possible Grafana float would convert Leslie’s and Woods’s paper positions into hard numbers and may move them up the 2027 ranking.

The 2027 list. If Firmus lists, IREN moves to Australian sites, and a CDC liquidity event materialises, the six-entry footprint in 2026 sets a low bar.