How Much Chinese Technology Is Inside America's Data Centers?

The United States operates more data center capacity than any other country. Hyperscale facilities operated by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Meta collectively contain millions of servers and tens of thousands of networking devices. Colocation providers — Equinix, Digital Realty, CyrusOne — house equipment for thousands of enterprise customers. Enterprise data centers operated by banks, hospitals, government agencies, and corporations add further scale.

Within this infrastructure, Chinese-manufactured components appear across multiple hardware categories. The presence is not uniform — some categories are dominated by Chinese suppliers, others are more diversified — but the aggregate footprint is substantial.

Server hardware presents a layered picture. The major branded server vendors — Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, Supermicro — all manufacture or source components from China. Lenovo, the world's largest PC manufacturer, is a Chinese-owned company; its server division (formerly IBM's x86 server business) supplies equipment to American enterprises and government agencies.

Supermicro, a San Jose-based company, manufactures a significant portion of its server motherboards in China. The company was the subject of a 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek report alleging that Chinese intelligence had implanted surveillance chips in its hardware — a claim Supermicro, Apple, Amazon, and the U.S. government denied. Supermicro has since shifted manufacturing toward the United States and Taiwan, but Chinese-origin components remain in its supply chain.

Beyond branded vendors, the white-box server market — commodity hardware assembled to customer specifications — draws heavily on Chinese component manufacturers for motherboards, power supplies, chassis, and cooling components.

Networking equipment is the category most directly addressed by U.S. government restrictions. Huawei and ZTE — both on the FCC's Covered List and the Commerce Department's Entity List — are prohibited from supplying equipment to U.S. telecommunications networks receiving federal subsidies. The FCC's Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act requires carriers to remove and replace covered equipment.

However, these restrictions apply specifically to telecommunications networks, not to private enterprise data centers or cloud infrastructure. American companies are not prohibited from purchasing Huawei or ZTE networking equipment for internal use, though most major operators have moved away from these vendors following government guidance and reputational pressure.

Other Chinese networking vendors — including H3C (majority-owned by Unisplendour, a subsidiary of Tsinghua Holdings, a state-affiliated entity) — operate in segments of the American market with less regulatory scrutiny than Huawei or ZTE.

Data center cooling is an area of significant Chinese manufacturing presence that has received comparatively little regulatory attention. Cooling accounts for roughly 30–40% of data center energy consumption, and the equipment market — chillers, cooling towers, computer room air conditioning units, liquid cooling systems — includes substantial Chinese manufacturing.

Vertiv, a major data center infrastructure company, manufactures cooling equipment in China. Schneider Electric's data center cooling products are partly manufactured in China. Chinese companies including Airedale (acquired by Modine Manufacturing) and domestic Chinese vendors supply cooling equipment to American facilities.

The AI computing buildout — driven by the deployment of GPU clusters for large language model training and inference — is accelerating demand for advanced liquid cooling. Chinese manufacturers are active suppliers in this market.

Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), power distribution units (PDUs), and backup generators are critical data center components. Chinese manufacturers — including Huawei's power division, Eaton's Chinese manufacturing operations, and domestic Chinese vendors — supply equipment in this category.

Battery backup systems, increasingly using lithium-ion technology, draw on Chinese battery manufacturing. CATL, BYD, and other Chinese battery manufacturers supply cells used in data center UPS systems, though often through intermediary vendors.

Federal restrictions on Chinese data center equipment are narrower than is sometimes assumed. The FCC Covered List and NDAA Section 889 restrictions apply to federal procurement and federally subsidized telecommunications — not to private-sector data centers generally.

The Biden administration's executive orders on supply chain security and the Commerce Department's information and communications technology (ICTS) rules provide authority to restrict Chinese technology in critical infrastructure, but enforcement actions targeting data center hardware have been limited.

The CHIPS and Science Act and related industrial policy initiatives are intended to reduce dependence on Chinese semiconductor manufacturing, but the transition is measured in years, not months. In the near term, Chinese-manufactured components will remain present throughout American data center infrastructure.