How much US compute is China renting from the cloud?
SubscribeSign in
How much US compute is China renting from the cloud?<br>China is restricted from purchasing advanced US chips, but it can rent liberally from the cloud. Even a modest share of US cloud compute could already be boosting China's AI compute by over 60%.<br>Cassia King<br>May 22, 2026
Share
This is part one of a series on remote access to US compute through cloud services. Subsequent posts will examine regulatory authorities on cloud compute and explore ideas for know-your-customer frameworks.<br>The US restricts the sale of advanced AI chips to China, and on the whole these controls appear to be working: China’s projected compute ownership in 2026 amounts to less than 5% of the United States’.1 But because compute remains unrestricted through cloud services, Chinese companies can access an unknown additional amount remotely. This post tries to scope how much.<br>Specifically, NVIDIA Blackwell sales are prohibited to Chinese customers, and NVIDIA H200s are subject to approval, with licenses reportedly capped at 75,000 chips per customer. But there are no customer caps on remote access to compute through the cloud, including on more advanced Blackwells and, in the future, Rubin chips. US hyperscalers, neoclouds, and third-country providers offer rentable AI compute2 through the cloud, and the data center build-out behind these offerings is set to expand massively over the next few years.<br>Researchers have a reasonably good idea of how much physical compute China produced and acquired in 2025 and how much it will produce and acquire in 2026. What remains unknown is how much AI compute they access from cloud service providers. If providers track this figure, they do not share it publicly or with the US government (as far as I am aware). According to data from Epoch AI, key US-headquartered cloud providers account for around 16 million H100-equivalents3 of the 20 million sold since 2022, amounting to about 80% of total advanced AI compute available worldwide. After accounting for compute rented by US labs, how much of the remaining could China be accessing?4<br>In this post, I provide rough estimates to establish upper and lower bounds on how much compute Chinese companies could be accessing remotely through the cloud. I estimate this range is between about 9 million H100-equivalents and 670,000 H100-equivalents. This is a broad range—the main takeaway from this post is that it’s not known how much compute is rented to otherwise prohibited users. The upper bound is an outsized number relative to what’s been reported, and it’s likely the actual number is around 670,000, if reports are accurate. In a Monte Carlo simulation, ChinaTalk analysts arrive at a similar estimate of about 1 million H100-equivalents, which would increase China’s compute access by at least 80%.<br>Below, I synthesize what researchers have gathered from open-source reports, press releases, and earnings calls to estimate how much cloud compute could be available for commercial rent (upper bound) and how much China is known to rent (lower bound). Given that China is renting, or will be renting, a sizable amount of compute in Malaysia, I’ll zoom in on the country’s data center build-out to analyze what capacity is there now and what’s expected to come online in the coming years.<br>How much US compute could China be renting?
There is a fair amount of open-source information out there to help researchers piece together reliable estimates. Epoch AI tracked revenue statements and earnings calls to estimate AI chip ownership, informing my upper-bound estimate of how much compute is commercially available to rent globally. Investigative journalists confirm that Chinese companies are renting US compute from various cloud service providers, informing my lower bound on how much China is accessing.<br>An upper bound for cloud compute used by China
I estimate that of approximately 20 million H100-equivalent AI chips sold from 2022 through the end of 2025, about 9 million are commercially available to rent. In the chart below, Epoch AI estimates US compute sales and disclosures for NVIDIA, AMD, Google, and Amazon chips total around 20 million H100-equivalents.5
To trim down this number, I subtract sales to companies that don’t provide cloud services and sales to China. That leaves about 16 million H100-equivalents, accounted for by Google, Microsoft, Oracle, CoreWeave, and a remaining category of chip sales labeled “Other” that I will sort out further below.<br>Now, subtract the compute set aside for US frontier labs. I include data centers that came online as recently as May 2026, assuming at least three to six months’ time for GPU testing and commissioning.6
After accounting for the AI compute used by frontier labs at cloud service providers, about 11 million H100-equivalents remain.<br>Epoch AI’s “Other” category accounts for NVIDIA’s remaining customers after accounting for hyperscalers, xAI, and CoreWeave,...