China’s Tsinghua University sits in northwest Beijing and stretches across roughly 1,200 acres. On a typical afternoon, science and engineering students crowd the grounds. Badminton games run near the east gate. Inside the Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence, teams work quietly with whiteboards full of formulas and freshly painted walls while studying how the human brain processes thought. The rise of DeepSeek, an AI startup founded by alumni, gave students confidence that Chinese teams could compete directly with the world’s strongest labs. “DeepSeek showed that a Chinese team could lead in the LLM race,” said Yuyang Zhang, a PhD student in computational biology at Tsinghua. Government backing turns campus research into national priority The growing attention around Tsinghua is tied closely to Beijing’s technology (and specifically AI) agenda. President Xi Jinping, a graduate of the university, has urged private companies to help develop key technologies, with artificial intelligence at the top of that list. The government followed with tax breaks, subsidies, and policy support. Founders like Liang Wenfeng of DeepSeek raised large sums of venture capital and saw their images run alongside Xi’s in state media. Graduates from Tsinghua also hold senior AI roles at major companies such as Alibaba and ByteDance, and inside the university’s labs, researchers built an AI chip called Accel to compete with products from Nvidia. Same guys also created DrugCLIP, a system designed to speed drug discovery, and a training method known as Absolute Zero Reasoner, which allows AI models to train without human-provided data. Between 2005 and the end of 2024, Tsinghua filed 4,986 AI and machine learning patents, including more than 900 in 2024 alone, according to data from LexisNexis. The school holds more AI research papers among the 100 most cited globally than any other university.China now represents more than half of all active AI patent families worldwide. “This is a staggering shift in innovation in less than a decade, and it reflects China’s concerted drive to become an AI superpower,” said Marco Richter, senior director of IP analytics and strategy at LexisNexis. Students build new models as China widens the talent pipeline China’s AI instruction now starts in elementary schools alongside math and language, a pipeline feeds a large workforce. China produced 3.57 million STEM graduates in 2020, compared with 820,000 in the United States, based on figures from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. State media later reported that the annual number of STEM graduates reached five million. Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, China’s only Turing Award winner, returned after years at Princeton, Stanford, and MIT to teach at Tsinghua. In 2023, undergraduates Guan Wang and William Chen created an AI model inspired by layered human reasoning, and it model outperformed larger systems from OpenAI and Anthropic on reasoning tests and complex Sudoku puzzles in early 2025. AI tools now appear across the Tsinghua campus, as research in many fields relies on AI models. Student competitions to build specialized agents run regularly and in September, the school launched a subsidized AI computing platform for all students, according to Bloomberg’s claims . The United States still leads in influential patents and top-performing models. Harvard and MIT rank higher on patent impact, and American institutions produced 40 notable AI models in 2024, compared with 15 from China, based on the Stanford AI Index Report. China’s share of the world’s top 2 percent AI researchers rose from 10 percent in 2019 to 26 percent in 2022, while the US share fell from 35 percent to 28 percent, based on figures from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them .
