China’s access to artificial intelligence computing power will double next year, but US-designed chips will account for about 65 per cent of that capacity, an indication of its continued reliance on foreign hardware, according to new research.
Total compute available to Chinese entities was expected to expand in 2027 from about 4.6 million to 8.8 million “H100-equivalents” – a metric benchmarked against Nvidia’s data-centre graphics processing units, according to a report by the Washington-based Institute for Progress (IFP).
To project these figures, IFP said it tallied domestic chips, legal imports, smuggled processors and compute accessed remotely via overseas cloud networks. Remote access alone was expected to swell to 2.8 million H100-equivalents by the end of 2027, up from roughly 1 million this year, according to the report published this week.
While the US maintains a roughly 16-fold advantage in AI training compute over China, leading Chinese models lag their American rivals by only 6.5 months, the report said.