In March of this year, with the appointment of Chinese-born Chen Lizhu as CEO of Intel, the five major chip giants—AMD, Broadcom, TSMC, NVIDIA, and Intel—entered an era predominantly led by Chinese executives. Overnight, the phrase "Indians dominate the internet, Chinese dominate chips" reverberated globally.

Some attribute this to Indians' extroverted nature and the Chinese's reserved yet diligent research ethos. Some even go so far as to suggest that the Chinese are unstoppably replacing Indians in these realms.

The Gulf Stream Economic Review contends that Chinese dominance in chips is more a convergence of industrial waves and the tide of the times, encompassing not only the national narrative of chip industry development but also the melancholy of several generations of Chinese who cannot return home or reconnect with old friends.

01

From the Internet to the Chip Manufacturing Wave

Indians have already established their dominance in the internet sphere:

• Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, is Indian-born.
• Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, is Indian-born.
• Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, is Indian-born.
• Neil Mohan, CEO of YouTube, is Indian-born.
• Sundar Pichai, former CEO of Twitter, is Indian-born...

Delighted by this identity, Indians began to celebrate online: "We Indians are born geniuses!"

Some Indian executives even went as far as to state that this was an epidemic originating in India, an "Indian CEO virus," with no known vaccine...

Well, it must be admitted that the cafeterias of American internet giants are increasingly filled with the aroma of curry.

Only in the past two years have Indians' inflated egos somewhat subsided. They realized that the more cutting-edge field of chips has long been dominated by the Chinese:

• Morris Chang, a Chinese-American, turned TSMC into the world's largest and leading chip foundry.
• Jen-Hsun Huang, a Chinese-American, transformed NVIDIA into the company with the largest market capitalization globally.
• Lisa Su, a Chinese-American, transformed the struggling AMD into a formidable competitor to Intel and NVIDIA.
• Hock Tan, a Chinese-American, turned Broadcom into the world's fifth-largest semiconductor company and gained fame for planning to acquire Qualcomm in 2017.
• Chen Lizhu, a Chinese-American, rated as "one of the most connected executives in the technology industry," is now the CEO of Intel...

Five Chinese leading five major chip giants is enough to stir the world a bit.

If we further broaden our focus to the most significant application scenario of chips—AI—we will find that Chinese (in a broad sense) have already soared to great heights:

• Andrew Yao, winner of the Turing Award (the Nobel Prize of computer science) and founder of Tsinghua Yao Class (China's highest hall of undergraduate computer education).
• Fei-Fei Li, who led the deep learning revolution in artificial intelligence, especially computer vision, by creating ImageNet.
• Kaiming He and his team proposed deep residual learning, enabling neural networks to reach unprecedented depths and capabilities, contributing to breakthroughs such as AlphaGo and ChatGPT, making fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence.
• Wenfeng Liang and Zhilin Yang are the founders of DeepSeek and Dark Side of the Moon, respectively...

Andrew Yao is from the post-1940s generation, Fei-Fei Li from the post-1970s, Kaiming He and Wenfeng Liang from the post-1980s, and Zhilin Yang from the post-1990s. This illustrates that at the forefront of the AI field, Chinese (in a broad sense) are like wisteria in spring, with some in full bloom above and others waiting to bloom below.

Statistics from Macro Polo on the mobility of top AI researchers globally show that nearly half of Chinese undergraduate graduates go to the United States to pursue master's/doctoral degrees related to artificial intelligence and stay to work there, far ahead of other countries. No wonder some would say:

Half of the global AI research talent is Chinese.

02

Miracles Stem from Numbers

Upon reflection and analysis of "Indians dominate the internet, Chinese dominate chips," the underlying logic should be the sheer number of talents.

China and India have consistently been the two countries with the largest number of students studying abroad in the United States, surpassing other nations by a significant margin. For the 2023-24 academic year, the number of Chinese students studying in the United States is 277,000, and the number of Indians is 332,000. Together, students from these two countries account for over half of the total international student population in the United States.

Since China resumed sending students to the United States in 1978, the number of Chinese students studying there has soared. Data shows that in the 1977-78 academic year, only 9 Chinese students were enrolled in higher education institutions in the United States, and by the 1987-88 academic year, this number had reached 25,000. China's ranking among the sources of international students in the United States also jumped from outside the top 50 to second place.

Since the beginning of this century, the number of students from China and India studying in the United States has fluctuated. In the first decade, India had a slight advantage; then China surged ahead, leaving India behind; after the COVID-19 pandemic began, India once again surpassed China.

Most of those who went are elites, at least top academic performers, making it relatively straightforward to understand why they can excel in their respective fields.

A study by Harvard Business Review shows that around 30% of the leaders of the world's top 500 companies, including technology firms, banks, fast-moving consumer goods, and restaurants, are of Indian descent, such as Indra Nooyi, former CEO of PepsiCo, Ajay Banga, former CEO of Mastercard, and Dinesh Paliwal, former CEO of Harman International.

In other words, "Indians dominate the internet" is merely one manifestation of "miracles stemming from numbers."

03

Times, Homeland, Old Friends

The question arises: despite the fluctuating numbers of Chinese and Indian students studying in the United States over the past 40 years, why do Indians produce so many CEOs while Chinese do not?

First, the wave of Chinese students studying in the United States came later than that of India, leading to a talent mismatch.

The influx of high-level Indian talent to the United States can be traced back to the 1960s. At that time, the Indian economy was stagnant, and a large number of high-level talents were unemployed, worrying about housing and money.

It just so happened that the United States, across the ocean, extended an olive branch to them: In 1965, the United States passed a new immigration law that lifted restrictions on immigration from Asia. Coupled with the influence of the American Dream, a large number of high-level Indian talents flocked to the USA.

However, it was not until after China's reform and opening-up that there was a surge of enthusiasm for studying in the United States.

Producing a corporate executive in a foreign land takes at least two generations or even longer, let alone becoming a CEO of a Fortune 500 company or a top player in the tech industry. Often, the first generation creates the environment, and the second generation achieves great success. They are like characters in literature, fluent in English but with no desire to return home; they have old friends but no old language.

Therefore, even a delay of a dozen or two decades, or even just a year or two, makes a significant difference.

Second, China's increasing attractiveness has instead led to a talent gap.

In the 1990s, China's internet industry was just starting, with huge market potential. A group of high-achieving students who had studied in the United States returned to China to start businesses, founding internet companies such as Sohu and Baidu, which influenced the development of the internet in China and even globally.

On the other hand, India faces challenges such as poor infrastructure, a caste system, rampant bureaucracy, a chaotic political system, and an extremely complex business environment... Which Indian would dare to return?

Therefore, Indians have capitalized on the situation when it comes to being internet CEOs.

Furthermore, Indians have indeed developed a set of strategies for navigating the American workplace, which can be summarized as emphasizing technology, management, and cultural genes.

India's education policy places emphasis on engineering and technology education. As early as the 1950s, it imitated MIT to establish seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), with seven branches, and gradually developed more than 550 engineering and technology colleges and over 1,100 science and technology colleges. In comparison, there are relatively few science and engineering colleges in China. According to 2015 data, there were only 203 science and engineering institutions of higher learning in China (including comprehensive universities with a focus on science and engineering).

These IITs indirectly provide a steady stream of elite talent to the United States. Looking at the resumes of Indian-origin CEOs, it can be found that many of them also have a background in science and engineering.

At the same time, India also spares no effort in cultivating management talent. Taking the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) as an example: As the cradle of Indian management talent, it cooperated with MIT, Harvard Business School, and others to establish branches as early as the 1950s, making Indian management talent renowned both at home and abroad. According to statistics, Indians with MBA degrees account for 28% in Silicon Valley, while Chinese account for only 7.2%.

Therefore, most Indian-origin CEOs also have an MBA background and are almost all "technology + management" compound talents.

Coupled with the fact that Indians grow up in a complex social environment and are more willing to share in terms of personality, they are better able to adapt to American workplace culture. Zoom's boss Eric Yuan once said that the secret to success in Silicon Valley "is mainly a cultural issue": "For example, many Chinese engineers are reluctant to share when working on projects. However, here it is very transparent, so even if your project is not completed, you should communicate openly and honestly and come up with a solution."

In other words, Chinese tend to be more specialized in their professional studies, advocating "having a specialized skill," thus missing some opportunities to become CEOs.

Of course, every cloud has a silver lining. The internet industry relies more on software development and system integration, with relatively less dependence on basic sciences; the chip industry relies more on profound basic scientific knowledge. Therefore, as typical technical leaders, Chinese are more suited to shining in the chip industry.

In recent years, China has increasingly emphasized and actively laid out the chip industry. Coupled with the quantitative advantage of Chinese students studying abroad, it is believed that in the future, internal competition among Chinese in the chip field will intensify!

References:

• Yuan Qing, Yue Tingting: The Development Process and Trends of Chinese Education in the United States in the New Era, Contemporary Chinese History Studies
• Time Weekly: Indian-origin CEOs Dominate Silicon Valley, Indians Are Inflated: We Are Born Geniuses
• Yuanchuan Technology Review: Indian Scientists: We Can Dominate Silicon Valley, But We Can't Save India
• Quantum Bit: What Is India's Strongest Output? CEOs! American Giants Under Indian Domination: 2 With Market Capitalization Exceeding Trillion, Leading 30% of Fortune 500 Companies
• American Study Abroad Moms Circle: Indian-origin CEOs Dominate the Screens in the United States: Why Are They More Successful Than Chinese with Lower Degrees?