In addition to the US of course. His 36,000 plus employees are sourced globally. But it’s good that even in thest times of severe US/China geopolitical tussles over trade, tariffs, and tech curbs, Jensen is personally focused on getting the best and brightest AI research talent in China as well.
“Zhu Banghua and Jiao Jiantao share photos of themselves with Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia.”
“US chip giant Nvidia has hired two prominent artificial intelligence (AI) experts who hail from China, underscoring the rising global recognition of talent from the mainland and their key contributions to the field’s advancement.”
“Zhu Banghua and Jiao Jiantao, both alumni of China’s Tsinghua University, said on their respective social media accounts that they joined Nvidia, sharing photos of themselves with Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of the company.”
Both candidates are in the zone of current AI research and commercial priorities:
“We’ll be joining forces on efforts in [AI] model post-training, evaluation, agents, and building better AI infrastructure – with a strong emphasis on collaboration with developers and academia,” Zhu said, adding that the team was committed to open-sourcing its work and sharing it with the world.”
“Nemotron is a group at Nvidia dedicated to building enterprise-level AI agents, according to the team’s official website. The team’s Nemotron multimodal models power AI agents for sophisticated text and visual reasoning, coding and tool-use capabilities.”
Both candidates have China and US technical training credentials. For example,
“Jiao, who received a PhD in electrical, electronics and communications in engineering from Stanford University in 2018 after graduating from Tsinghua with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, said on LinkedIn over the weekend that he joined Nvidia to “help push the frontier of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial super intelligence (ASI).”
“AGI and ASI are higher levels of AI that are meant to reach or exceed human intelligence.”
The top researchers of courese know each other, be they from China or elsewhere:
“Zhu and Jiao have worked together before, co-launching a start-up called Nexusflow AI in Palo Alto, California between June 2023 and June 2025.”
“Jiao served as CEO of the firm, which developed an open-source Athene-V2 model that rivalled OpenAI’s GPT4o in terms of performance.”
Nvidia of course is not alone in focusing on Chinese AI talent, whether they’re trained in China or in the US.
“Nvidia’s recruiting of Zhu and Jiao came as Chinese experts were increasingly being recognised as a driving force in advancing generative AI – the technology behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT – with some star researchers in high demand at leading US tech firms.”
Google is another example of a US company focused on Chinese AI talent:
“He Kaiming, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was recently tapped by Google to join the company’s AI research facility DeepMind as a distinguished scientist.”
“Originally from China’s southern Guangdong province, He graduated from Tsinghua and the Chinese University of Hong Kong and is a highly recognised scientist in the field of computer vision and deep learning.”
“Meta also reportedly poached at least five Chinese AI researchers from OpenAI, according to reports by The Wall Street Journal and the Information.”
“Those included Zhai Xiaohua from OpenAI’s Zurich office; as well as Yu Jiahui, Ren Hongyun, Bi Shucao and Zhao Shengjia, key contributors to a slew of OpenAI’s models.”
“China was the second-largest source of AI talent in the US in 2023, accounting for 26 per cent of top-tier researchers, just behind American researchers who made up 28 per cent, according to a report by research agency Marco Polo, which is affiliated with think tank the Paulson Institute.”
“China has produced a huge number of top A.I. engineers in recent years. New research shows that, by some measures, it has already eclipsed the United States.”
“New research shows that China has by some metrics eclipsed the United States as the biggest producer of A.I. talent, with the country generating almost half the world’s top A.I. researchers. By contrast, about 18 percent come from U.S. undergraduate institutions, according to the study, from MacroPolo, a think tank run by the Paulson Institute, which promotes constructive ties between the United States and China.”
“The findings show a jump for China, which produced about one-third of the world’s top talent three years earlier. The United States, by contrast, remained mostly the same. The research is based on the backgrounds of researchers whose papers were published at 2022’s Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. NeurIPS, as it is known, is focused on advances in neural networks, which have anchored recent developments in generative A.I.”
“The talent imbalance has been building for the better part of a decade. During much of the 2010s, the United States benefited as large numbers of China’s top minds moved to American universities to complete doctoral degrees. A majority of them stayed in the United States. But the research shows that trend has also begun to turn, with growing numbers of Chinese researchers staying in China.”
China of course has also been focused in this area for a long time:
“China has nurtured so much A.I. talent partly because it invested heavily in A.I. education. Since 2018, the country has added more than 2,000 undergraduate A.I. programs, with more than 300 at its most elite universities, said Damien Ma, the managing director of MacroPolo.”
Particularly on where AI is going next:
““A lot of the programs are about A.I. applications in industry and manufacturing, not so much the generative A.I. stuff that’s come to dominate the American A.I. industry at the moment,” he said.”
It’s been an acute reality of the AI Tech Wave in these early days, that the top companies up and down on the AI tech stack below, are both each other’s...
