Washington Think Tank IFP Report: China's AI Compute to Double by 2027, with 65% Reliance on US Chips
Washington-based think tank IFP predicts that while China's AI computing power will double next year, approximately 65% of it will still rely on US-designed chips and offshore cloud access.
According to a report by the Washington-based Institute for Progress (IFP), total AI computing power available to Chinese entities is expected to double in 2027, expanding from about 4.6 million to 8.8 million "H100-equivalents." However, the study indicates that approximately 65% of this capacity will continue to depend on US-designed chips, highlighting China's persistent reliance on foreign hardware.
The IFP projected these figures by tallying domestic chips, legal imports, smuggled processors, and compute accessed remotely via overseas cloud networks. Remote access alone is expected to swell to 2.8 million H100-equivalents by the end of 2027, up from roughly 1 million this year. 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, largely due to distillation techniques where developers train systems on the outputs of superior AI models.
In light of these findings, the institute urged US policymakers to impose stricter controls on overseas cloud access, chip smuggling, and legal exports. A separate report by the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy called on the US Bureau of Industry and Security to restrict Chinese access to cloud capacity large enough for training frontier AI models. Meanwhile, Huawei Technologies announced last month that its Ascend 960DT chip would become available in the first quarter of 2027, three quarters ahead of schedule. However, research group Epoch AI identified high-bandwidth memory as the main constraint on Huawei's output, estimating that Huawei's chip production this year would deliver less than 4% of the computing power of Nvidia's global shipments.