XI’AN, China ? For years, many of China’s best and brightest left for the United States, where high-tech industry was more cutting-edge. But Mark R. Pinto is moving in the opposite direction.
Mr. Pinto is the first chief technology officer of a major American tech company to move to China. The company, Applied Materials, is one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent firms. It supplied equipment used to perfect the first computer chips. Today it is the world’s biggest supplier of the equipment used to make semiconductors, solar panels and flat-panel displays.
In addition to moving Mr. Pinto and his family to Beijing in January, Applied Materials, whose headquarters are in Santa Clara, California, has just built its newest and largest research labs here. Applied Materials is hardly alone. Companies are being drawn here more and more as China develops a high-tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States.
The Chinese market is surging for electricity, cars and much more, and companies are concluding that their researchers need to be close to factories and consumers alike. Applied Materials set up its latest solar research labs here after estimating that China would be producing two-thirds of the world’s solar panels by the end of this year.
“We’re obviously not giving up on the U.S.,” Mr. Pinto said. “China needs more electricity. It’s as simple as that.”
China has become the world’s largest auto market, and General Motors has a large and growing auto research center in Shanghai. The country is also the biggest market for desktop computers and has the most Internet users. Intel has opened research labs in Beijing for semiconductors and server networks.
Western companies are also attracted to China’s huge reservoirs of cheap, highly skilled engineers ? and the subsidies offered by many Chinese cities and regions, particularly for green energy companies.
Now, Mr. Pinto said, researchers from the United States and Europe have to be ready to move to China if they want to do cutting-edge work on solar manufacturing . “If you really want to have an impact on this field, this is just such a tremendous laboratory,” he said.
Xi’an has 47 universities and other institutions of higher learning, churning out engineers with master’s degrees who can be hired for $730 a month.
On the other side of Xi’an from Applied Materials sits Thermal Power Research Institute, China’s worldleading laboratory on cleaner coal. The company has just licensed its latest design to Future Fuels in the United States.
The American company plans to pay about $100 million to import from China a maze of equipment that turns coal into a gas before burning it. This method reduces toxic pollution and makes it easier to capture and sequester gases like carbon dioxide under ground.
Future Fuels will ship the equipment to Pennsylvania.
Small clean-energy companies are headed to China, too. NatCore Technology of Red Bank, New Jersey, discovered a way to make solar panels much thinner, reducing the energy and toxic materials required to manufacture them. American companies did not even come look at the technology, so NatCore reached a deal with a consortium of Chinese companies to finish developing its invention and mass-produce it in Changsha, China.
When Xie Lina, a 26-year-old Applied Materials engineer, was asked recently whether China would play a big role in clean energy, she was surprised by the question. “Most of the graduate students in China are chasing this area,” she said. “Of course, China will lead everything.”
By KEITH BRADSHER
Workers at Thermal Power Research Institute in Xian, China, which recently licensed its latest design to Future Fuels in the United States. / SHIHO FUKADA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
