AI PhD graduates draw packages up to 8M yuan as Chinese tech giants battle for talent
A widely circulated social-media post claims NVIDIA offered a 2026 Peking University integrated-circuit PhD a first-year pre-tax package of about 2.9 million yuan, including signing and performance bonuses plus a possible Silicon Valley posting after two years; the report notes that NVIDIA China PhD campus offers were generally 450,000–600,000 yuan five years ago. Recruiters cited in the piece say multi-million-yuan packages for top-school AI PhDs are no longer unusual, with Tsinghua's Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences large-model graduates starting at 4–5 million yuan, JD.com offering 8 million yuan to a new graduate and Xiaohongshu about 6 million yuan to a master's graduate in large models. ByteDance, Tencent, Alibaba and Kuaishou run programs such as Top Seed, Qingyun Plan, Alibaba Star and Kuaishou Star, with ByteDance's 2026 Top Seed cohort recruiting roughly 30 PhDs; the article also cites market chatter of a near-160 billion yuan ByteDance AI budget for 2026 and Alibaba's 380 billion yuan three-year AI and cloud commitment, plus over 100 billion yuan of quarterly Tencent AI infrastructure spending.
The numbers show how much leading companies are willing to pay for scarce AI research talent, though most figures rest on unverified posts and recruiter accounts.