Reference Note: Global AI Compute Disparity

Created by CK Cheruvettolil

Technical Assumptions and Data Sources for the Training Run Simulator (2025-2026)

Global North (The Performance Baseline)

  • • The U.S. and its Tier 1 partners host the vast majority of global AI compute capacity and leading AI firms.
  • • The Global North serves as the reference point for unrestricted access to "Tier 1" AI infrastructure.
  • • U.S. private AI investment reached $109.1 billion in 2024—nearly 12 times China's and 24 times the U.K.'s.
  • • Organizations in this region have immediate access to the NVIDIA H200, which offers 1.4x to 1.9x performance leaps in memory-intensive training and inference.

China (The Export Control Penalty)

  • • To comply with U.S. export controls, hardware like the NVIDIA H20 is used, which is significantly slower for training large models than standard H100/H200 clusters.
  • • Chinese models currently lag behind U.S. counterparts by an average of 7 months due to hardware performance degradation forced by trade restrictions.
  • • While China leads in total data center clusters (230), its effective AI compute power is limited by performance constraints on individual chips.

India (The Infrastructure Capacity Gap)

  • • India holds roughly 1.2 million H100 equivalents, compared to the U.S.'s 39.7 million—a nearly 33-fold difference.
  • • India hosts nearly 20% of the world’s data but possesses only 3% of global data center capacity, leading to "queue latency".
  • • The IndiaAI Mission has successfully scaled domestic capacity to 38,000 GPUs to provide affordable, subsidized access for startups.

Global South (The Infrastructure Stall)

  • • High-income countries host 77% of global data center capacity, while low-income countries hold less than 0.1%.
  • • Only one-quarter of the population in sub-Saharan Africa has access to reliable internet, a prerequisite for cloud-based AI training.
  • • Scaling AI requires a robust digital backbone that fewer than 10% of organizations in these markets can currently afford.

Regional Benchmarks & Reference Links

Region Key Metric (2025) Data Source
Global North $109.1B Private AI Investment Stanford HAI AI Index
China 400K H100 Equivalents TRG Superpowers Report
India 38,000 GPUs (Subsidized) IndiaAI Mission (PIB)
Global South <0.1% Data Center Share World Bank Digital Factsheet