China is 2.7× as exposed to semiconductor supply shocks as the US, Epoch AI estimates. Epoch traces chips through input-output tables to model the impact of a Taiwan shock and decoupling.

China's six leading AI firms earn about 10% of OpenAI and Anthropic's combined AI revenue. Epoch AI examines their five revenue streams: consumer apps, model access, enterprise and government solutions, licensing fees, and indirect monetization through cloud and advertising.

Huawei plans major gains in AI chip performance by 2030, but US export controls cap its most important scaling levers. Epoch AI estimates Huawei will produce less than 4% as much AI compute as Nvidia in 2026, a share that could be around 1% by 2028 without access to foreign memory.

Epoch AI's analysis of trade data finds a pattern consistent with $3B worth of chips smuggled to China via Malaysia. China recorded $3.8B of server imports from Malaysia in 2024–25; Malaysia recorded only $0.6B of exports.

We estimate that between 290,000 and 1.6 million H100-equivalents (H100e) were smuggled to China through 2025. Our median estimate of 660,000 H100e would be roughly a third of China's total compute.

Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle collectively hold an estimated 71% of the world's cumulative AI compute as of Q4 2025, up from 63% in Q1 2024.

A prolonged Hormuz crisis probably won't derail the compute buildout, but it could slow data center expansion and disrupt Gulf investment flows into AI.

Can Chinese and open model companies compete with the frontier through e.g. distillation and talent?

We announce our new AI Chip Owners explorer, showing which companies own the world’s leading AI chips.

Since 2023, every model at the frontier of AI capabilities, as measured by the Epoch Capabilities Index, has been developed in the United States. Over that same period, Chinese models have trailed US capabilities by an average of seven months, with a minimum gap of four months and a maximum gap of 14.