China overtakes UK in AI talent race
China is overtaking the UK in the global race for AI talent, as a growing share of the world’s leading researchers are trained and retained domestically rather than moving to Britain or Europe.
Data cited by The Economist shows that at the 2025 conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, half of all presenting researchers began their careers in China, up from 29 per cent in 2019.
Closer to home, the UK accounts for only a small share of the global AI talent pool, with China now home to more active AI researchers than the US, Britain, and Europe combined, according to Digital Science.
The shift reflects both the scale of China’s education system and its ability to retain graduates.#
Nearly 70 per cent of researchers who completed undergraduate degrees in China remained there in 2025, more than double the share in 2019, while around three-fifths continued their studies domestically.
What’s more, Chinese universities now dominate the pipeline of top AI researchers. Nine of the ten most represented undergraduate institutions at the 2025 conference were based in China, led by Tsinghua University. The UK has no universities in that top tier by volume.
China is also producing talent at a greater scale, with around 40 per cent of university students studying science, technology, engineering and maths subjects, which is roughly double the proportion seen in Western countries, including the UK.
Mind the talent gap
The country’s AI workforce is not only larger but younger, with nearly half of the researchers still in education, compared with around 30 per cent in the West.
At the same time, China is retaining more of its domestic talent while attracting back researchers trained overseas through competitive salaries, research funding and government-backed incentives.
The UK, which has historically relied on international talent to sustain its AI sector, faces increasing competition as fewer researchers leave China and more choose to return.
The result is a shift in the concentration of leading AI research. Around 37 per cent of the world’s top AI researchers are now based in China, compared with a far smaller share across the UK.
Industry figures have warned that talent is becoming the defining factor in the AI race. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, has said it is “absolutely” possible for Western countries to fall behind.
As China expands both the size of its talent pool and its ability to retain talent, the gap with countries such as the UK is expected to widen further.