Because there is tremendous risk of having data located in China. This is not the case with Bitcoin. If you put your SOTA AI/ML project there, your IP will be stolen, guaranteed. If you put your Bitcoin mining there, your only risk is the hardware.
The Bitcoin mining farms in China are not rented out to western customers. They do not sell the raw processing power. They sell the finished product: mined blocks.
They could do the same for ML. Sell the trained models.
The trained model is a guarded treasure. There's a reason why very few ML papers publish their trained models; or Deepmind/OpenAI never releasing the resulting models - it's expensive to train the network, but cheap to use it afterwards. You don't want anyone unauthorized to get their hands on it.
