- On its 1,200-acre campus in Beijing, Tsinghua University has become the epicenter of China’s AI boom, following the success of DeepSeek – an LLM startup founded by an alumnus, which sent shockwaves through the global tech industry.
- Tsinghua is likened to the Stanford + MIT + Carnegie Mellon of China, leading the world in rankings for engineering, AI, computer science, and chemical engineering.
- China promotes AI through tax incentives, subsidies, and support policies; founders appear in the media alongside President Xi Jinping, who is also a Tsinghua alumnus.
- The university developed the Accel AI chip, the DrugCLIP platform, and the Absolute Zero Reasoner protocol; many alumni are involved in Alibaba, ByteDance, and lead at least 4 top AI startups.
- From 2005–2024, Tsinghua filed 4,986 AI/ML patents, with over 900 patents in 2024, surpassing the total number of patents from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Princeton combined; China accounts for over 50% of global AI patents.
- China trained 3.57 million STEM students in 2020, increasing to 5 million/year recently, far exceeding the US (820,000). This creates a massive talent pool for AI research.
- Programs like Yao class and the Brain and Intelligence laboratory promote interdisciplinary methods; the startup Sapient developed the Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM), outperforming models from OpenAI and Anthropic in reasoning benchmarks.
- Tsinghua operates X-lab with over 900 startups launched since 2013; students are granted free computing credits for all AI research.
- Although the US maintains a lead in “patent influence” and the number of excellent AI models (40 compared to China’s 15 in 2024), the gap is narrowing.
- The proportion of elite AI researchers in China (top 2%) increased from 10% (2019) to 26% (2022), while the US decreased from 35% to 28%. Many Tsinghua students choose to stay in China instead of going abroad.
📌 From 2005–2024, China’s Tsinghua University filed 4,986 AI patents, surpassing the total number of patents from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Princeton combined; China accounts for over 50% of global AI patents. Tsinghua is likened to the Stanford + MIT + Carnegie Mellon of China. Tsinghua surpasses US universities due to its strong AI ecosystem, State support policies, and a STEM talent pool of up to 5 million people/year. The proportion of elite AI researchers in China (top 2%) increased from 10% (in 2019) to 26% (in 2022), while the US decreased from 35% to 28%. Many Tsinghua students choose to stay in China instead of going abroad.
