Every month, at least two to three Indian-origin AI researchers in Silicon Valley between the ages of 25 and 35 reach out to Aakrit Vaish, founder of AI venture fund Activate, asking, “How can I come back to India and work in AI?”

As we spoke, the Mumbai-based executive explained that Indian startups are hoping to capture top talent and capitalize on this precise moment in time. 

For decades, a big tech job has been the North Star for India’s elite tech workers, offering unmatched prestige, compensation, and a ticket to global mobility. 

Now, a combination of layoffs spurred by AI and Trump’s tightening immigration policies is reducing the once-unquestioned appeal of Silicon Valley giants. Meanwhile, Indian AI jobs are evolving beyond back-end roles.

An early-stage AI company in India pays 50%–75% of what Microsoft, Google, or Meta pays for an equivalent role, but getting a foot in the door sooner comes with lucrative stock option plans and performance-linked incentives, Vaish said. 

“A lot of people are willing to take that sort of 50% sacrifice today for the greater pot at the end,” Vaish said. 

OpenAI and Anthropic have recently started expanding their engineering and AI capabilities in India. 

India has “only one qualified engineer available for every 10 open GenAI positions,” Neeti Sharma, CEO of tech staffing firm TeamLease Digital, told me. “In a market this supply-constrained, every credible employer is tapping into the same shallow pool.”

The aura hasn’t disappeared, but the calculus has fundamentally shifted.”Anuj Agrawal, founder and CEO of recruitment firm Zyoin Group

Anuj Agrawal, founder and CEO of recruitment firm Zyoin Group, routinely sees the same hiring shortlists turn up at Indian AI startups and at the India arms of global tech firms. 

“The aura hasn’t disappeared, but the calculus has fundamentally shifted. [U.S.] Big Tech sold two things: frontier work and stability. The layoff cycles of 2023 through 2025, combined with H-1B unpredictability, have broken the stability half of that equation. We’re now seeing Indian engineers weigh visa risk, role volatility, and family disruption as real costs, not edge cases,” Agrawal told me.

A survey of 1,205 Indian techies by anonymous employee review app Blind between April 27 and May 6 showed India-based employees at Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, and Google are willing to work for homegrown firms if laid off. 

This is “exactly the caliber of talent [Indian] companies need to compete globally. But converting that interest into actual talent acquisition will require a fundamental shift in workplace culture,” Alex Han, public relations manager at Blind, told me, citing overwork and burnout.

The competition is particularly hot in the five-to-15-year experience bracket, where AI, machine learning, cloud engineering, cybersecurity, and platform architecture talent is concentrated, Anshuman Das, CEO and co-founder of recruitment firm Careernet Group, told me.

“The traditional perception that career growth, cutting-edge innovation, and global impact are possible only through Silicon Valley is gradually evolving,” Rajesh Nambiar, president of Nasscom, India’s apex IT services and tech lobby group, told me. “At the same time, it would be inaccurate to frame this purely as a zero-sum shift away from American firms. What we are witnessing instead is the emergence of a much more interconnected global talent market.”

The co-founder of AI startup Sarvam recently hosted a mixer of about 150 in the Bay Area “trying to recruit Indian AI talent in the U.S. to come back to India and work for him,” Vaish said. Sarvam is India’s biggest bet for a sovereign large language model startup.