How Chinese billionaire Chen Tianqiao went from building online gaming empire to betting fortune on neuroscience, AI

Chen, 53, and his firm, Shanda Group, said earlier this year that they are committed to investing billions of dollars in technology, including brain-computer interface and artificial intelligence.

But long before Shanda became a multinational investment firm with a focus on technology, it was China’s largest internet company and a pioneer of the country’s online gaming industry.

It was originally established as Shanda Interactive Entertainment in 1999 by then 26-year-old Chen, his wife Chriss Luo and his younger brother with roughly $60,000 in savings.

Before that, Chen had graduated from Fudan University a year early with a degree in economics, met Chrissy while they were both working at a securities firm and married her within six months. They left their jobs to start the business.

At the time, many Chinese entrepreneurs were racing to build internet portals and web directories modeled on early platforms like Yahoo!. Such web companies largely used pageviews to prove their popularity to advertisers and investors.

“We had an interest in games but didn’t want to do something that another company had already done because it wasn’t interesting or exciting enough for us,” Chen recounted in a 2007 interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Shanda’s game client, however, was a software that did not rely on loading web pages, making it difficult to attract investors in the early stages.

“That’s why we decided on games plus instant messenger. But because it was hard to find investors, we had a lot of pressure.”

Despite the challenges, Chen and his team pushed ahead. Their breakthrough came when they bought the distribution rights to a South Korean game named Legend of Mir II, which quickly generated a surge in revenue and gave Shanda the capital to begin developing its own titles.

Shanda went public in the U.S. in 2004, raising $151.8 million in its initial public offering. They went on to become the largest internet company in China shortly after that.

Chen was ranked the third richest man in China by Forbes that same year. His current net worth is estimated at $1.4 billion as of June 2.

But as Shanda hit its peak in the mid-2000s and Chen’s influence at times rivaled that of Alibaba’s Jack Ma, he began experiencing severe panic attacks.

“I remember some nights, I wake up, and my heart is going boom, boom, boom,” Chen later said in a 2018 interview for a Medium post. “I realized something terrible was happening to me.”

The panic attacks led Chen and his wife to relocate to Singapore in 2010, where they gradually stepped back from day-to-day involvement in the business. They then took Shanda private and shifted its headquarters to the city-state in 2012.

They later sold their stakes in the games unit, Shanda Games, which they had earlier spun off, and Chen also stepped down from its board.

While taking his break in Singapore, Chen observed as rivals such as Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu filled the space Shanda had once occupied and at one point considered a return to the industry. However, his wife encouraged him to instead find new opportunities beyond gaming.

In a 2017 interview with Bloomberg at his Singapore office, Chen reflected on that period as a necessary pause, saying he was ready to move on from his thirtysomething self to what he described as a new chapter.

“I look at him and think he was a bright young man,” Chen said in the interview. “But I need to let that Tianqiao stay there and move forward.”

After a period in Singapore, the couple moved to the U.S. and turned Shanda into a technology-focused investment platform deploying capital through public markets, venture capital and private equity, though the shift was not without its pressure.

“When I was at Shanda, I did not watch how the stocks were doing. As long as I kept working hard, the price would go up gradually each quarter,” he told Chinese media in an interview posted on Shanda’s website.

“But now I don’t have a company or that feeling of control. I invest in others and wonder if they will work hard. This sense of uncertainty is always with me, even now.”

Since moving to the U.S., Chen has also turned his attention to brain research, pledging around $1 billion to the field and collaborating with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

His interest, according to the Chinese media interview, was sparked after learning about Caltech neuroscientist Richard A. Andersen’s work that enabled a paralyzed patient to control a robotic arm with his mind.

That moment prompted him to explore neuroscience more deeply. He began studying undergraduate-level textbooks provided by the president of Stanford University, using them as a way to build both language skills and scientific understanding simultaneously.

Over time, he also engaged directly with neuroscientists, holding discussions, listening closely, taking detailed notes, and cross-referencing ideas as he learned.

Shanda is now a major investor in brain-computer interface technologies, which translate neural signals into digital commands that can be used to support treatments for neurological conditions such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease.

As interest in AI accelerated in recent years, Chen’s interest has expanded further into frontier AI development.

He is betting his personal fortune on what he describes as “discoverative AI,” a system designed to go beyond current large language models, which primarily replicate human patterns in generated content. Often referred to as artificial general intelligence, such technology can help in disaster planning and even drug discovery.

“I want to create an AI that is not just intended to replace humans, but to do things that humans cannot do, so that humans can go further,” Chen told Bloomberg earlier this year.