"Top AI Talents Choose China More Than the US… South Korea Rises to 4th"

A survey has shown that China has overtaken the United States to emerge as the top destination of choice for the world's leading artificial intelligence talents.

Carnegie China, a think tank under the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, released a report titled "Who Is Winning the Global AI Talent Race" containing these findings.

The report stated that based on a survey of researchers who published papers in 2025 at NeurIPS, the world's most prestigious AI conference, 4,174 researchers (40.6%) worked in China, while 3,514 (34.2%) worked in the United States.

In a 2022 survey, the ratio between the US and China was 46 to 27, but three years later in 2025, it shifted to 34 to 41, with China surpassing the US.

Following China and the US, the regions most chosen by AI talents as of last year were Europe (706 researchers, 6.9%), South Korea (487 researchers, 4.7%), the United Kingdom (312 researchers, 3.0%), and Singapore (271 researchers, 2.6%), in that order.

Changes were also observed in the rankings of institutions attracting AI talent.

Based on the affiliated institutions of the paper authors, Google ranked first in 2022, followed by Tsinghua University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Microsoft, Meta, Peking University, the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in the 2nd to 10th positions.

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 1st and 2nd places, respectively, while the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) rose to 3rd.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University followed in 4th, MIT in 5th, Stanford University in 6th, Google in 7th, the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 8th, Zhejiang University in 9th, and UIUC in 10th.

Among the top 10 institutions, five were Chinese universities, while the number of US institutions dropped to four, combining both universities and corporations.

The report explained, "More Chinese researchers are staying in China than before," adding that "this is because Chinese graduates have found it easier to secure jobs in China's rapidly growing AI industry, and tighter visa restrictions have made it more difficult for Chinese graduate students, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and math fields, to come to the United States."

The report also noted, "Asia outside of China, namely South Korea and Singapore, has achieved notable results in the field of AI talent," and pointed out that "South Korea not only recorded the second-highest talent retention rate at 77%, but its key research institution KAIST jumped 12 spots compared to 2022 to rank 3rd among top-tier AI talent-producing institutions."

(Photo: AP, Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.