China bypasses US sanctions via cloud services
Approximately 65% of AI computing power available to China will be provided by chips developed in the United States
China is increasing its access to AI computing not only through its own accelerators but also via foreign cloud platforms. The 2027 assessment includes Chinese chips, legal imports, smuggled supplies, and remote access to foreign computing resources.
Meanwhile, the US maintains roughly a 16-fold advantage over China in AI training computing power, and the gap between advanced Chinese models and American ones is estimated at about 6.5 months. One factor contributing to the narrowing of this gap, according to the Institute for Progress, is distillation—training compact models using outputs from larger systems. China has previously rejected US accusations of aggressively employing this practice.
The Institute for Progress has urged Washington to tighten control over China's access to foreign cloud services and complicate the supply of accelerators. Simultaneously, Chinese companies are developing their own solutions: Huawei Technologies is preparing the Ascend 960DT accelerator, though its production is constrained by a shortage of HBM memory.
