China is Buying Singapore's AI Talent at SGD 280,000 Per Head, McKinsey Says

The headline goes something like this: Chinese companies, in their never-ending quest to outperform the United States in artificial intelligence, have decided that the easiest way to get world-class AI talent is to simply buy it from a country roughly the size of a small Indonesian province. That country, of course, is Singapore.

According to a recent industry report from consulting firm McKinsey, China is on track to face a shortfall of 4 million AI (artificial intelligence) workers by 2030. ^[2] Four million. Let that settle in. That is, by any reasonable calculation, a lot of computer scientists. And rather than waiting for its own universities to graduate that many, China has opted for a more direct approach: headhunting. Specifically, headhunting Singaporean graduates, with a particular fondness for those whose résumés contain the words “artificial intelligence.” ^[1]

The compensation package, meanwhile, is reportedly around 280,000 Singapore dollars on average. ^[3] I did mathematics. That is, in any currency, a substantial sum for someone who has just finished school. It is also, conveniently, a number large enough to make a freshly-minted graduate forget whatever patriotic duty they may have felt toward staying home.

The stated goal, per the same report from consulting firm McKinsey, ^[5] is twofold. First, to bolster China’s domestic AI industry. Second — and this is the part that gets the geopolitics people typing — to further stick it to their American rivals. ^[6] Apparently, the global AI race has a Singapore leg now. Or rather, a Singapore head. The brain-drain framing is, to put it gently, doing some heavy lifting.

And the textual affair between the two countries, as the report’s own author put it, is only growing stronger. Which is a polite way of saying that Chinese companies are not slowing down. If anything, they are reportedly planning to expand their teams in Singapore ^[4] — and not just the recruitment operations, mind you, the actual Singapore-based teams. Which means the talent pipeline is becoming a talent residency. Singapore is less a recruiting ground and more a forward operating base.

There was, in the report’s telling, a “recent hiccup” — a phrase that does a great deal of work and reveals almost nothing. One imagines some kind of diplomatic wobble, a regulatory letter, an awkward press conference, or perhaps just a Zoom call that went sideways. The report does not specify. China, for its part, is not specifying either. And so the expansion continues, hiccup and all. ^[4]

Now, the question that the report poses — and the one your friendly neighborhood news anchor is contractually obligated to ask on your behalf — is what this means for everyone else in the region. Singapore is, by population, a city-state. It cannot, by any reasonable accounting, churn out four million AI workers a year — China’s problem, not theirs. Their actual AI graduate pipeline is, by definition, smaller, and most of those graduates are now being courted with the kind of starting salaries that would make a Jakarta tech worker briefly consider learning Mandarin. Which, by the way, is part of the deal — learn Chinese, the report notes helpfully. ^[1] Buddy.

Whether this is good for Singapore depends entirely on whom you ask. The finance ministry, presumably, sees the inbound cash and the high-value job creation and nods approvingly. The universities see a marketing opportunity. The students see SGD 280,000. Everyone sees something different.

Whether this is good for the region is a different question, and one the report does not pretend to answer. Which is a polite way of saying that someone should probably ask. Not me, ideally. I have a deadline.

In the meantime, China is collecting heads. Singapore is exporting them. And the rest of us — your friendly neighborhood anchor included — are watching the next chapter of the global AI race write itself, in real time, in a language most of us did not study in school.

Make of that what you will.