The overseas hiring spree underscores these “big tech” firms’ growing ambitions to build up their skilled workforce in AI systems development and semiconductor design amid increased competition in their home market.

Social media giant ByteDance, the parent firm of TikTok and Douyin, was the most active recruiter among its peers, with more than 100 AI-related job vacancies posted in San Jose, California and Seattle, Washington.

The Beijing-based company, also known for its multimodal video generation model Seedance 2.0 and Doubao chatbot, sought new tech leads, engineers and research scientists for its various specialised AI teams.

Those include its Seed department for fundamental research that covers the Seedance model, coding product Trae and the Vision-Applied Research team dedicated to models for image generation and video editing.

Baidu, meanwhile, had its Sunnyvale, California-based operation post 10 job vacancies focused exclusively on semiconductor design, with roles for central processing unit development, system-on-a-chip architecture and design verification.

That focus signalled Baidu’s intent to achieve greater tech hardware self-reliance amid increased demand for high-end AI chips in global supply chains.