China’s orchard of AI, chip grads now ripe for the pickin’ as tech trade sours

When Jack Wang enrolled as an undergraduate in microelectronics at a prestigious Chinese university, the year was 2019, and China was in the early days of its trade war with the United States.

Looking back, his decision to focus on the field revolving around the design and manufacture of hi-tech microchips has proved prescient. Today, it complements Beijing’s aspirations to make world-leading semiconductors amid Washington’s amped-up efforts to curtail China’s technological progress.

Indeed, the sector has grown by leaps and bounds in the six years since Wang laid out his focus of study, and it now serves as the backbone for artificial intelligence (AI) advancements.

“I realised that this industry was booming, and AI had been kind of popular back then – it just wasn’t as capable as it is today,” he said.

2019 was also the year that China’s Ministry of Education approved the first batch of AI majors at 35 universities, following an action plan in 2018 that sought to turn Chinese universities into global talent hubs leading the development of next-generation AI by 2030.

Today, more than 535 universities in China offer AI-related majors, and nearly half of the world’s top AI researchers are from the country, according to recent findings by Morgan Stanley.

That massive pool of AI talent, in a nation of 1.4 billion people, is giving China a competitive edge in the field that has become a defining battleground in global technological and geopolitical competition, researchers and industry professionals say.