China’s best and brightest tech talent is going back to China

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.When Meta Platforms said in April that it would lay off 10% of its staff, Allen Sun quickly booked a trip to Menlo Park, Calif.It was a prime opportunity. Sun, a Beijing-based headhunter for some of the biggest Chinese tech companies, works to lure China-born talent back home, targeting people at U.S.-based companies such as Meta, Google, Anthropic and Amazon.

Some clients are authorizing him to promise salaries that match or exceed the workers’ Silicon Valley pay—a windfall given China’s lower cost of living.“The compensation is very competitive,” said Sun.For decades, making it in the U.S. was the ultimate sign of success for China’s best and brightest.

Now, many of them are coming home—and the reverse brain drain is fueling Beijing’s efforts to edge out the U.S. in artificial intelligence, robotics and medical research.There is an unprecedented jostling for AI talent among the richest companies and global superpowers that has skyrocketed tech researchers to NBA and Hollywood levels of wealth and spurred a cutthroat recruitment blitz across the industry.

It’s not just American CEOs attempting to entice researchers with lavish job offers. (Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was dangling $100 million pay packages last year.)Recent examples of high-profile AI talent poached by top Chinese tech companies include Wu Yonghui, a former vice president of research at Google who helped develop Gemini and now heads research for TikTok-parent ByteDance’s AI arm, and Yao Shunyu, a former OpenAI researcher who was named Tencent Holdings’ chief AI scientist.There’s a longstanding name within China for those going back home—“sea turtles,” a pun on the Mandarin term for overseas returnees, haigui, that also