News of Huawei’s enviable annual salaries to be offered to eight newly-recruited graduates with distinguished performances at school sparked heated debates on the internet, youth.cn reported.

Huawei announced its decision in a statement outlining plans to apply an annual salary management mechanism to certain outstanding graduates in 2019.

The eight fortunate students have mostly majored in cutting-edge fields related to artificial intelligence, and are given an annual salary spanning between 896,000 yuan ($130,000) to a staggering 2.01 million ($290,000).

The notification said that Huawei must win the technology and business war in the future, with its core motives rooted in innovation. Global talents must therefore be brought in to confront the toughest challenges while earning the highest salaries in order to provide the innovative soil.

Among the eight new employees, the highest salary goes to Zhong Zhao, Ph. D from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Zhong majored in pattern recognition and intelligent systems both in his post-graduate and doctoral studies, according to Liu Chenglin, Zhong’s doctoral supervisor and deputy head of Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Liu attributed the high salary to Zhong’s research direction, which is a new trend some believe to be very practical.

“His research focuses on automated designs of in-depth neural network structures, which means developing how to make the machine learn neural network structures automatically. The AI designs may have better performance than human designs, with a promising future. Few are doing this research in the current stage, which I think pushes Huawei to value it so much,” said Liu.

He Rui, another graduate in the lucky list from the same university as Zhong, majored in computational mathematics.

Guo Tiande, deputy head of the School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in the interview that “Huawei recruiting Ph.D graduates with fat salaries shows the eagerness for high level talents in China’s science and technology industry field, and is a symbol of the advancement of Chinese science and technology standards.”

Huawei’s CEO Ren Zhengfei highlighted last month that the company planned to bring in 20 to 30 young talents across the world, and was considering attracting another 200 to 300 in the next year.

Huawei’s move will possibly influence college students while choosing their research areas, said Liu, although career success is nevertheless determined by multiple personal as well as professional qualities.

These lucky students should keep their past glories in mind. The school is expecting to see them doing a great job at work and make great contributions for the country’s technological development, Guo added.