Chinese firms Bytedance and Tencent reportedly offer massive 150% pay increases and 35% bonuses to entice AI talent — salaries and increases also expected to balloon in 2026

Chinese tech companies ByteDance and Tencent are spending massive amounts on bonuses and salaries to attract and retain AI talent. According to South China Morning Post, the former has increased its budget for employee bonuses by 35% over the previous year, while also allocating 150% more for future salary increases. On the other hand, the latter is reportedly hiring senior staff from competitors, even offering double their current salary just to get them to move.

This is part of the ongoing trend of increasing competitiveness in the AI jobs market, with companies in both the East and West looking to hire and retain the most talented AI engineers and developers to gain an edge over everyone else. While these companies are spending a lot of money on their people, this pales in comparison to what Meta is allegedly offering.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the social media giant is enticing his employees with $100 million in bonuses and even bigger salaries, but none of them have taken the bait. One founder even claimed that he received a billion-dollar offer from Meta for four years, which he declined.

However, Tencent apparently succeeded where Zuckerberg has failed: the Chinese tech giant has recently hired Yao Shunyu, a former OpenAI researcher, as its chief AI scientist. He reports directly to its president, Martin Lau, and also heads the company’s AI Infrastructure and LLM Development units, reporting to Technology Engineering Group Head Lu Shan.

All this news of skyrocketing pay and bonuses might be a bitter pill to swallow for the rest of the tech industry, though. Over 100,000 individuals in the tech sector have already been hit by layoffs in the first half of 2025, with Intel taking the lead, cutting over 20,000 jobs as October 2025.

Increasing AI adoption is also expected to disrupt every other professional field, with an MIT simulation showing that 11.7% of U.S. workers are likely to be replaced by the technology, leading to a loss of $1.2 trillion in salaries in benefits across the board. This though has been echoed by other analysts and business leaders, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Ford CEO Jim Farley saying that it will wipe out half of entry-level white collar jobs in the U.S.

Because of this, some lawmakers are concerned about AI’s impact on our society. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I.-Vt.) has called for a halt to all AI data center construction while Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.) and two other Democratic senators have asked several big tech companies to explain how their power consumption has affected nearby communities. Nevertheless, it seems that AI development will continue surging forward, and unless something big happens that disrupts its progress (like the AI bubble bursting), we will likely see the disparity between the AI industry and other workforces to only grow bigger.

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