By total headcount, India and China are the two largest. India has around 920,000 AI professionals, of whom about 257,600 are in core AI roles. China's technical AI workforce has been estimated at around 955,000 positions. The United States has fewer people but a higher share of frontier researchers.

By working headcount in a single city, yes. Bengaluru accounts for about 19% of India's AI learners and roughly half of India's AI talent by state government figures, drawn from a national pool of around 920,000. No other single city has a working AI population that size. Rankings that put San Francisco or London first are usually measuring capital, research output or company density, not people.

Yes, through an Employer of Record. The EOR is the legal employer. They issue the contract, run payroll, withhold tax and file returns. You direct the work. This is legal in all five countries listed here, though China has the tightest rules.

It varies by provider and country. Flat fee models start around $99 per employee per month. Percentage models typically run 8% to 15% of gross salary, which is why they get expensive fast at senior salary levels. In China, percentage pricing is the norm and sits at the higher end.

Bengaluru, by a wide margin, for applied and production AI work. You get four to six senior engineers for the cost of one Bay Area equivalent, and employer contributions in India are among the lowest of any major market. The caveat is that frontier research talent is thinner there than in the Bay Area or London.

The order has been stable for two years. The gap is not. Bay Area AI headcount grew 24% year on year and India's core AI workforce is growing faster than that in absolute terms. We update this page once a year.

India, among the five markets on this list. A five-person AI team costs about $217,800 a year fully loaded in Bengaluru against $1,464,900 in the Bay Area. The cost gap comes from two things. Salaries are lower, and employer statutory contributions in India are among the lowest of any major market at 3% to 8% of salary.

It depends on what that person has to do. If the first hire is doing research or building something nobody has built before, the Bay Area, London or Zurich have the deepest bench of people who have done it already. If the first hire is turning a working prototype into something that runs reliably in production, Bengaluru or Hyderabad give you the same capability at a fraction of the cost, and you can afford to hire the second and third engineer at the same time.

Onboarding, not sourcing. In India, the UK and the United States an EOR can usually have someone employed and on payroll within a few working days once the candidate has accepted. In Israel it is closer to a week. China is the outlier at two to four weeks. Sourcing and interviewing sit on top of that and typically run four to ten weeks in every one of these markets.

A GCC is an offshore office a multinational runs itself rather than outsourcing. In India they are now the largest employer of core AI talent, running 40% core AI roles within their AI teams against 27% for IT services firms. It matters because it means the senior applied AI talent in Bengaluru has been working on production systems for global companies for years, not doing support work.

Because this ranking weighs how easily a foreign company can actually hire. China's pool is enormous, but EOR fees run 8% to 15% of gross salary, onboarding takes two to four weeks, and data handling under PIPL and intellectual property assignment both need specialist drafting. The talent is there. The friction is real.