# Chinese host on vast.ai masquerading as US host > Source: > Published: 2026-06-29 07:54:39+00:00 My regular go-to GPU rental service for ad-hoc ML fine-tuning is vast.ai. It's a marketplace of spare GPU resources, great for non-regular rental. Interestingly, for the first time yesterday I encountered a host that appeared to be from the US, but it was actually not. It felt a little slow when I was on it. Turns out it was actually a Hong Kong host, proxying vast.ai traffic from a US. Chinese hosts are usually cheaper and initially avoided due to very limited international bandwidth. Now it's worse as AI services like @claudeai actively block access from Chinese IPs, which makes the workaround not just slow but quietly unusable for real workloads.