China is investing more than $1.4 billion in a new institute run by former scientists at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory, part of an ambitious program to hire top U.S. scientists and obtain advanced American technology, according to an investigation by The Washington Times.

The Eastern Institute of Advanced Study (EIAS) is described on its Chinese website as the precursor to the planned Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT) in Ningbo, China. Organizers are paying American scientists million-dollar salaries and providing other lucrative benefits for their knowledge of cutting-edge technology that China has been unable to generate independently.

The program has hired some of the United States’ most experienced scientists, according to documents and open-source research specialists who have studied the project.

The EIAS and the proposed EIT are below the radar and backed financially and politically by the regional Chinese Communist Party in Ningbo, south of Shanghai. The project is the latest version of Beijing’s Thousand Talents recruitment program.