(Beijing = Yonhap News) Correspondent Jeong Seong-jo = China has surpassed the United States and emerged as the region of choice for the world's top artificial intelligence (AI) talent, according to a survey.
On the 23rd, 'Carnegie China', a think tank affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, published a report titled 'Who is ahead in the global AI talent competition?' containing this content.
The report found that 4,174 (40.6%) of researchers working in China and 3,514 (34.2%) working in the United States were surveyed on a sample of researchers who published papers in 2025 in NeurIPS, the world's most authoritative AI academic society (10,280 out of 25,677 authors with both undergraduate and graduate school experience).
In the 2022 survey, the ratio between the US and China was '46 to 27', but three years later, in 2025, China surpassed the US at '34 to 41'.
As of last year, following China and the United States, the regions most chosen by AI talents were Europe (706 people, 6.9%), Korea (487 people, 4.7%), the UK (312 people, 3.0%), and Singapore (271 people, 2.6%).
There was also a change in the ranking of institutions where AI talent is concentrated.
Based on the author's affiliation, Google ranked first in 2022, and Tsinghua University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Microsoft, Meta, Peking University, University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) ranked 2nd to 10th. There were three companies and seven universities, and excluding two Chinese universities, eight were located in the United States.
However, in 2025, Peking University and Tsinghua University took first and second place, and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) rose to third place.
Next was Shanghai Jiaotong University in 4th place, MIT in 5th place, Stanford University in 6th place, Google in 7th place, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 8th place, Zhejiang University in 9th place, and UIUC in 10th place.
Among the top 10 institutions, there were 5 Chinese universities, and in the United States, including universities and companies, the number fell to 4.
Based on the region where bachelor's degrees were obtained, the proportion of talent produced in China has increased over the past three years.
In the 2022 survey, the proportion of talent produced in China was 46.3%, and that of the United States was 19.8%, followed by Europe (7.2%), India (6.2%), and Korea (4.8%).
However, in the 2025 survey, China's share was more than half, at 57.4%, and the United States' share was reduced to 13.3%. Europe and India's share also decreased to 6.4% and 4%, respectively, but Korea's share increased to 5.7%.
The number of researchers trained in China remaining in China has also increased.
In the 2022 survey, among a sample of researchers (1,460 people) who graduated from universities in China, 56.6% chose China as their place of work, and 31.8% chose the United States.
On the other hand, in 2025, among the sample of Chinese college graduates (5,903 people), the proportion of people working in China increased to 68.7%, and the proportion of people working in the United States decreased to 21.2%.
As of last year, the proportion of researchers remaining working in their hometown was highest in the United States (88.7%), followed by Korea (77.2%), China (68.7%), and Europe (60.1%).
When looking at cases where AI researchers left their home region and moved to other countries, as of last year, the United States was still the country with the largest 'net inflow' of AI talent, with 155 outflows and 2,300 inflows, and China was the country with the largest 'net outflow' of AI talent, with 1,847 outflows and 118 inflows.
“More Chinese researchers are staying in China than ever before,” the report said. “This is because it has become easier for Chinese graduates to find jobs in China’s fast-growing AI industry, and tightened visa restrictions have made it more difficult for Chinese graduate students, especially in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, to come to the United States.”
In addition, the report said, "Asia excluding China, namely Korea and Singapore, have achieved notable achievements in the field of AI talent. Not only did Korea record the second-highest talent retention rate at 77%, but KAIST, a major research institute, ranked third in the ranking of institutions producing top-level AI talent, up 12 places compared to 2022."
