Estimate the ENERGIZED AI-accelerator compute capacity of Chinese entities as of 2026-06-30, in gigawatts of IT load. I am reconciling a global AI-capacity model in which US/Western-attributable capacity is independently built; the China line is currently a placeholder of 9.0 GW. Your job is to confirm, revise, or refute that number with evidence — not to ag…

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Estimate the ENERGIZED AI-accelerator compute capacity of Chinese entities as of 2026-06-30, in gigawatts of IT load. I am reconciling a global AI-capacity model in which US/Western-attributable capacity is independently built; the China line is currently a placeholder of 9.0 GW. Your job is to confirm, revise, or refute that number with evidence — not to agree with it. ## The quantity (frozen definition — do not answer a different question) - BOTH training AND inference capacity are in scope: "accelerator compute" means the chips regardless of workload. Training clusters are typically the largest single consumers — excluding them is an instant failure. If evidence permits, split training vs inference in the owner decomposition (graded); note that export-compliant NVIDIA (H20-class) is inference-oriented silicon while domestic training runs largely on Ascend — your split should be consistent with your Method A chip mix. - ENERGIZED only: racked, powered, running or available-to-run accelerators. NOT announced projects, NOT completed-but-dark shells, NOT chips in inventory, NOT pipeline/"planned by 2027." China has a documented history of idle/dark datacenter capacity — treat "built" and "energized" as different states, and idle-but-powered GPU halls as a separately flagged line. - IT LOAD, not facility power. If a source gives facility MW, convert and state your PUE you assumed. If a source gives chip counts, convert and state your W-per-accelerator all-in figure (accelerator board power x host/network/cooling overhead — state both factors). - SCOPE: workload capacity owned/controlled by Chinese entities — hyperscalers (ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu), AI labs (DeepSeek, Zhipu, Moonshot, MiniMax, 01.AI, StepFun), telcos/state clusters (China Mobile/Telecom/Unicom, regional "intelligent computing centers"), other enterprise. Report mainland capacity and Chinese-owned OVERSEAS capacity (e.g. ByteDance renting or building in Malaysia/Singapore/Middle East) as SEPARATE lines — I will decide which to include. - Attribute by WORKLOAD OWNER, not by host: ByteDance capacity hosted in a telco facility counts once, under ByteDance. State your rule when ambiguous.

White smoke — a verdict was reached, no dissent.

The Answer

The 9.0 GW placeholder is refuted; the energized AI-accelerator compute capacity of Chinese entities as of June 30, 2026, is 5.05 GW (Mainland China: 4.4 GW, Chinese-owned Overseas: 0.65 GW).

Who Deliberated

5 of 6 advocates deliberated.

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The Reasoning

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Notable challenges

Sources

The Panel

Gemini 3.1 Pro Claude Opus 5 GPT-5.6 Sol Magistral Medium Grok 4.5