An apparatus to facilitate in-place memory copy during remote data transfer in a heterogeneous compute environment is disclosed. The apparatus includes a processor to receive data via a network interface card (NIC) of a hardware accelerator device; identify a destination address of memory of the hardware accelerator device to write the data; determine that access control bits of the destination address in page tables maintained by a memory management unit (MMU) indicate that memory pages of the destination address are both registered and free; write the data to the memory pages of the destination address; and update the access control bits for memory pages of the destination address to indicate that the memory pages are restricted, wherein setting the access control bits to restricted prevents the NIC and a compute kernel of the hardware accelerator device from accessing the memory pages.