China overtakes US as top workplace for elite AI researchers

China has overtaken the U.S. as the leading workplace for elite AI researchers as more Chinese talent chooses to build careers at home, a new study found.

A humanoid robot at a robotics laboratory during a government-organized media trip in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, China, April 16, 2026

China was home to 41% of the top artificial intelligence researchers tracked in 2025, up from 27% in 2022, according to a study released Sept. 23 by think tank Carnegie China.

The U.S. share fell from 46% to 34% over the same period.

Researchers Damien Ma and Binyi Yang analyzed the education and employment histories of 10,280 researchers, representing about 40% of authors whose papers were accepted at the 2025 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, or NeurIPS, one of the world's leading machine-learning conferences.

China has also strengthened its position as the world's largest source of elite AI researchers. Those who completed their undergraduate education in China accounted for 57% of the talent tracked in the study, up 11 percentage points from 2022. Those educated in the U.S. accounted for 13%.

China is also retaining more of its homegrown talent. Some 69% of researchers who completed their undergraduate degrees there were working in the country in 2025, up from 57% in 2022.

Carnegie attributed the higher retention rate to expanding career opportunities in China's booming AI industry and tighter U.S. visa restrictions that have made it more difficult for some Chinese students and researchers to enter the country.

Major Chinese technology companies have also stepped up efforts to recruit researchers working overseas.

A Chinese researcher at Meta said he had received frequent approaches from ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent and was considering returning because their compensation packages exceeded his Meta pay and their AI teams included prominent researchers he recognized from major conferences, tech publication The Information reported.

ByteDance in February hired Wu Yonghui, a 17-year Google veteran who was among the researchers behind Google's Gemini AI models. Wu completed his undergraduate studies in China before earning a doctorate in the U.S. and now leads AI model research and development at ByteDance.

Tencent has recruited Yao Shunyu from OpenAI. Yao studied at China's Tsinghua University and earned his doctorate from Princeton University.

China's growing domestic AI ecosystem is also giving young researchers more reasons to stay. Many researchers behind DeepSeek's R1 model were educated entirely in China, while Beijing-based Zhipu AI draws on researchers and doctoral students from Tsinghua University.

The U.S., however, remains a major destination for global AI talent.

It retained 89% of researchers who completed their undergraduate degrees there, compared with China's 69%. The U.S. also recorded a net gain of 2,145 researchers in the Carnegie study, while China had a net loss of 1,729.

The flow of Chinese researchers to the U.S. remains substantial. Among AI researchers working in the U.S., the share who completed their undergraduate education in China increased by four percentage points from 2022.

Still, the imbalance in talent flows between the two countries has narrowed.

There were 30 Chinese-origin researchers working in the U.S. for every U.S.-origin researcher working in China in 2025, compared with 46 to one in 2022.

The study defines a researcher's country of origin by where they completed their undergraduate education rather than by nationality.