India wants its AI talent back home. But they won't return easily, caution experts

Arogyaswami Paulraj, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University, believes India has to build a strong ecosystem to woo talent in the fields of AI and semiconductors to return home.

“In the last five years from Stanford, maybe 10 profs have gone back to China—nobody has come to India,” Paulraj told a packed audience at Semicon India 2025. “It’s good to say I’ll bring them back, but it’s not easy. We need to do a lot more work.”

The note of caution cut through a day otherwise filled with optimism about India’s $12-billion deeptech push. It spotlighted the country’s central problem: world-class talent in the fields of AI and semiconductor is overwhelmingly Indian, but is also overwhelmingly abroad.

T.K. Kurien, CEO of Premji Invest, echoed the professor's view: “The original AI group I’ve been working with for many years has about 40 people globally. Thirteen of them are Indians. The talent exists. It’s just unfortunate they’re not in the country.”

The numbers tell the story. According to an analysis by the Institute for Progress, 60% of the US-based companies on the 2025 Forbes AI 50 list were founded or co-founded by immigrants.

India leads the pack with nine founders—beating China’s eight. Perplexity AI’s Aravind Srinivas (IIT Madras, then Berkeley, and OpenAI) is one such example. IIT Kanpur alumni Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta co-founded a robotics foundation-model startup called Skild AI, which is reportedly raising $500 million at a $4-billion valuation from SoftBank.

On the other hand, few founders are building from India.

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Paulraj pointed to China where tens of thousands of academics and entrepreneurs are lured home with strong state backing and well-funded labs. India, he said, has yet to show that kind of seriousness.

Many authors of key DeepSeek research papers had US education or experience but returned to China.

This trend is visible across both academia and industry, with returnees frequently taking on founding or executive roles within new AI ventures and state-sponsored institutes.

Paulraj said China has done a lot of things to facilitate the return of talent because it recognises that coming back is "a very difficult jump" given the well-developed ecosystem and much higher wages in the United States.

“China built very strong research labs and funded them aggressively. India doesn’t yet have that ecosystem” he said.

India produces a lot of AI-relevant bachelor’s degree courses than any other country, and trails only behind China in offering relevant PhDs, according to White House data. Yet some of the best-known Indian names in AI—including Arvind Jain, T R Vishwanath, and Piyush Prahladka of work AI platform Glean, and Ashwin Sreenivas of conversational AI platform Decagon—are scaling their ventures abroad.