US chipmaker Nvidia has onboarded two highly accomplished artificial intelligence (AI) researchers—Zhu Banghua and Jiao Jiantao—in a strategic push to bolster its global AI innovation footprint. Both scientists, alumni of China’s prestigious Tsinghua University, announced their new roles via social media over the weekend. The appointments reflect Nvidia’s growing emphasis on AI development, particularly in Agentic Systems and post-training model advancement.
Zhu posted a photo with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, confirming his role as a principal research scientist with the company’s Nemotron team, while Jiao also shared news of his new role at Nvidia focused on pushing the boundaries of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI).
Zhu Banghua Joins Nemotron to Advance AI Infrastructure
This brings strong academic credentials and prior experience in the AI sector. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Tsinghua in 2018 and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2024. He is currently an assistant professor at the University of Washington. Zhu has now joined Nvidia AI’s Nemotron team, which focuses on building enterprise-level Agentic Systems for intelligent automation, tool use, and reasoning tasks.
We’ll be working on post-training, evaluation, and building better AI infrastructure, with a commitment to open-source collaboration, Zhu stated on X. The Nemotron models are designed to support multimodal agents capable of high-level reasoning across text and visual data. Zhu’s expertise will play a key role in scaling these systems and deepening engagement with academic partners.
Jiao Jiantao to Drive AGI and ASI Initiatives at Nvidia AI
Jiao Jiantao, another Tsinghua graduate, received his PhD in electrical, electronics, and communications engineering from Stanford University in 2018. He is also a faculty member at UC Berkeley in electrical engineering and computer science. Jiao stated on LinkedIn that he has joined Nvidia to advance AGI and ASI, areas of AI intended to match or surpass human intelligence. His involvement is expected to accelerate Nvidia’s research in intelligent AI agents, bringing more depth to its Agentic Systems programs, especially those capable of autonomous decision-making and learning.
Nvidia Gains From Previous Startup Collaboration
Before joining Nvidia, Zhu Banghua and Jiao Jiantao co-founded Nexusflow AI, a Palo Alto-based startup that operated between June 2023 and June 2025. The company focused on open-source AI models and developed Athene-V2, a high-performing model that rivaled OpenAI’s GPT-4o in various benchmarks.
Zhu and Jiao’s joint work on Nexusflow gave them significant hands-on experience with building scalable and competitive models. This background is expected to enhance Nvidia’s positioning in the competitive AI landscape, especially as it continues to ramp up enterprise-grade agent capabilities. Their transition to Nvidia AI reflects a growing pattern of top-tier Chinese researchers contributing to major U.S. tech firms’ AI efforts.
Chinese AI Talent in High Demand Across U.S. Tech Giants
Nvidia’s latest hires come amid a wider trend of U.S. tech companies aggressively recruiting Chinese AI talent. According to a 2023 report from the Paulson Institute’s Marco Polo research agency, Chinese researchers made up 26% of top-tier AI talent in the U.S., second only to American researchers at 28%. Other firms are also engaging in this talent race. Google’s DeepMind recently hired MIT professor He Kaiming, an expert in computer vision and deep learning originally from Guangdong, China.
Meanwhile, Meta reportedly recruited five AI researchers from OpenAI, including key contributors from its Zurich lab. As Nvidia AI continues to scale its work in Agentic Systems, infrastructure, and AGI, the addition of experts like Zhu Banghua and Jiao Jiantao signals its serious commitment to long-term leadership in the global AI race.
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