Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sounded an alarm earlier this month, warning that China is rapidly closing in on the U.S. in the global race to AI dominance. And DeepSeek’s sudden rise earlier this year showed just how quickly the balance of power can shift.

That competition is playing out not just in Silicon Valley and Shenzhen, but also on university campuses. Beijing has been steadily building an AI powerhouse of its own at Tsinghua University—challenging the cutting-edge tech dominance of the U.S. Ivy League.

Tsinghua has produced more of the world’s 100 most-cited AI research papers than any other school, and the university generates more AI-related patents each year than MIT, Stanford, Princeton and Harvard combined. Between 2005 and the end of 2024, Tsinghua researchers filed 4,986 AI and

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