As artificial intelligence (AI) emerges as China's core growth engine, Chinese elites are choosing to enroll at Tsinghua University in Beijing instead of studying in the United States. As entrepreneurs from Tsinghua continue to shine under the government's full-throated support, there are signs that the "formula for success" is changing.
According to Bloomberg on the 18th (local time), more of China's top science and engineering students have recently been choosing to attend Tsinghua at home instead of going to U.S. universities as before. Tsinghua, traditionally strong in engineering and computer science, is regarded as comparable to Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.
In October, the university topped the CSRankings, a global computer science (CS) academic institution ranking, overtaking Carnegie Mellon University. CSRankings compiles its list based on publications in top-tier conferences.
Tsinghua's prodigies are particularly concentrated in the Yao Class, an undergraduate program spanning AI, quantum information, and computer engineering. It is known that more than half of admitted students are members of national Olympiad teams or first-prize winners in provincial math competitions.
Behind Tsinghua's rise is the Chinese government's full-scale support for the AI industry. As the government actively encourages private investment in AI and provides various tax incentives, subsidies, and policy support—coupled with a social atmosphere that casts AI founders as national heroes—talent is naturally aspiring to enroll at Tsinghua.
In practice, the Chinese government is easing corporations' investment burdens through electricity bill reductions and subsidies. Inland local governments in China operate subsidy programs that apply roughly half the industrial electricity rate to AI data centers, and energy subsidies for large data centers run by major big tech companies are also expanding. Earlier, Jensen Huang, chief executive officer (CEO) of Nvidia, said, "China will eventually surpass the United States in the AI race," noting, "Thanks to energy subsidies, China's electricity costs are effectively close to 'zero.'"
Research results are also becoming visible quickly. Tsinghua holds the most AI-related papers among the world's top 100 most-cited papers and files more AI patents each year than MIT, Harvard University, and Princeton University. According to tech information firm LexisNexis, from 2005 to 2024, Tsinghua secured a total of 4,986 AI and Machine Learning patents, with more than 900 patents granted in just the past year. China holds more than half of the world's AI patents.
Startup support infrastructure is also being expanded. Tsinghua's startup incubator X-Lab has produced about 900 Start - Up companies since its founding in 2013, and the institution helps student startup teams in AI, robotics, and biotech quickly enter the venture investment market. Recently, statistics professor Liu Jun, a Harvard graduate, reportedly established a new department of statistics and data science and began recruiting leading scholars from overseas.
China's education system, which promotes AI learning as a national strategy, also underpins talent development. In 2020, China produced 3.57 million STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates, a figure more than four times that of the United States. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington, D.C., think tank, among the world's top 2% of AI researchers, China's share rose from 10% in 2019 to 26% in 2022, while the U.S. fell from 35% to 28%.
Zhang Yuyang, a Tsinghua doctoral student, told Bloomberg, "In the past, we primarily considered going to the United States or overseas after graduation, but now there is a growing sense that we can conduct world-class research in China," adding, "Tsinghua is going through its most dynamic period right now."