Asian universities dominate AI rankings

Eighteen institutions among the world's top 20 for AI education are located in Asia, with Peking University leading the list, according to CS Rankings.

The 2026 CS Rankings for computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) were updated mid-january.

The top 10 institutions globally for artificial intelligence are all located in Asia. China accounts for seven of these leading positions. Beyond China, Singapore and South Korea each have one university in the top 10.

Within the top 20, Asian universities continue to outperform other continents, securing eight positions from 11th to 20th. The United States contributed only two institutions to this group.

The list of the world's top 20 AI education institutions as of early 2026 is as follows:

Rank	University	Country	Geometric mean of publications in the field	Number of faculty with publications
1	Peking University	Trung Quoc	13,4	95
2	Tsinghua University	Trung Quoc	12,7	91
3	Zhejiang University	Trung Quoc	12,6	83
4	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	Trung Quoc	11,9	88
5	University of Science and Technology of China	Trung Quoc	11,6	44
6	Nanjing University	Trung Quoc	10	96
7	Chinese Academy of Sciences	Trung Quoc	9,8	61
8	National University of Singapore	Singapore	9,4	42
9	Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology	Han Quoc	8,8	53
10	Harbin Institute of Technology	Trung Quoc	8,7	64
11	Renmin University of China	Trung Quoc	8,6	40
12	Nanyang Technological University	Singapore	8,5	42
13	Hong Kong University of Science and Technology	Trung Quoc	7,3	50
14	Carnegie Mellon University	My	7,1	55
14	Fudan University	Trung Quoc	7,1	48
16	Seoul National University	Han Quoc	6,7	47
17	University of Electronic Science and Technology of China	Trung Quoc	6,4	57
18	University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign	My	6,3	44
19	Chinese University of Hong Kong	Trung Quoc	6,0	28
20	Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence	UAE	5,3	46

CS Rankings is a global ranking system for leading computer science programs, based on data rather than reputation or cross-faculty evaluations used by QS or THE. This system measures the quantity of scientific papers and the number of faculty members who have published in the most prestigious scientific conferences and journals within the field.

The publications considered fall into several sub-fields: artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing, and internet and information retrieval.

More than 470 institutions were ranked as of 1/2026, an increase of nearly 200 institutions since september last year. Vietnam is represented by two universities: VinUni (ranked 301st) and Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology (ranked 355th).