As part of a compute instance migration, a compute instance which was executing at a first server begins execution at a second server before at least some state information of the compute instance has reached the second server. In response to a determination that a particular page of state information is not present at the second server, a migration manager running at one or more offload cards of the second server causes the particular page to be transferred to the second server via a network channel set up between the offload cards of both servers, and stores the page into main memory of the second server.