There is a much deeper and more important AI race in which China is crushing its competitors: human talent.
The AI race It’s about many things. Not only who makes the best AI modelswho has more and better data centers or who has more cheap energy to power this revolution. It’s also about something that right now China dominates with an iron fist: AI experts. China surpasses the US in talent. In The Economist have analyzed the evolution of the publication of studies at NeurIPS, one of the most important conferences in the world on AI. In the 2025 edition they have discovered a singular fact: for the first time in the history of this conference, China has surpassed the United States in studies presented, and that is the definitive sign of how the Asian giant has achieved a victory in a crucial area for the future of this technology. Alarming data. This data is not something isolated, but the result of a trend that began ten years ago. In 2019, 29% of researchers presenting their work at NeurIPS had started their careers in China. In 2025 that figure is 50%. Meanwhile, the proportion of quinees who began their careers in the US has increased from 20% in 2019 to 12% in 2025. The analysis is based on a sample of 600 articles written by almost 4,000 researchers (many studies have several researchers as authors). Chinese universities dominate. This analysis also served to analyze the origin of the researchers who published these studies. Nine of the ten institutions where the most NeurIPS 2025 researchers completed their studies are in China. Tsinghua University is, for example, the protagonist with 4% of all researchers. The prestigious MIT in the USA? Only 1% comes from there. Quantity matters, but also quality. It must be taken into account that this does not necessarily mean that China wins (or loses) in research quality, but it does in quantity. But this parameter is very relevant, because scale matters: when China manages to “produce” a huge number of AI graduates, its chances of those experts being responsible for new advances in this discipline increase. Not only that: it also makes these advances spread faster within the Chinese technological ecosystem. The US depends on Chinese talent. One of the most uncomfortable details of this study is where those who signed studies from US institutions were trained. Of all of them, 35% They graduated from Chinese universitiesthe same proportion as those who did so in US universities. Many leading AI companies in Silicon Valley are drawing on AI experts trained in China, which is increasingly the world’s largest pool of this type of engineers. Come home come back. What is worrying for the US is that the Chinese talent that US companies sign increasingly ends up returning to China. Chinese programs like Thousand Talents Plan They offer up to $100,000 annually plus subsidies for housing and research to attract that talent back. The United States government is also promoting just that, because the funding cutsthe uncertainty with visas and suspicions towards researchers of Chinese origin make working in the US no longer so attractive for these experts. Or what is the same: The US is shooting itself in the foot (again). From the American dream to the Chinese dream. In 2019, about a third of NeurIPS researchers who had graduated in China stayed in the country to work. In 2022 that proportion rose to 58%, and in 2025 the figure already reaches 65%. And as we mentioned, those who had left are returning: in 2019, only 12% of Chinese researchers who had completed postgraduate studies outside of China had returned, but in 2025 that figure has risen to 28%. The case of DeepSeek It is significant: none of its main contributors have a university degree outside of China: the talent who achieved that milestone He didn’t go through Stanford or MIT. The trend doesn’t lie. If we stick to the authors of studies published in NeurIPS as a metric, about 37% of the best researchers in the world now work in Chinese organizations, compared to 32% of those who do so in North American institutions. If this trend continuesin 2028, researchers working in China could outnumber those working in the US by two to one. Silicon Valley may continue to attract a lot of international talent, but the direction of the trend is clear, and that points to a worrying future for the United States. Image | Tommao Wang In Xataka | There is a city in China that goes head to head with Silicon Valley: welcome to Hangzhou, the home of the ‘Six Little Dragons’