Chinese host on vast.ai masquerading as US host

A user on vast.ai discovered a GPU host masquerading as a US-based machine was actually a Hong Kong host proxying traffic, resulting in slow performance and unusability for AI workloads due to Chinese IP blocks by services like Claude AI.

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.