What happened?
Huawei AI chips China: according to an IDC report seen by Reuters, NVIDIA's share of China's data-center AI accelerator market fell to 34% in the first half of 2026. Huawei reached 28%, narrowing the gap to just six percentage points.
NVIDIA shipped 678,000 units from January to June, down 44% from the same period in 2025. Huawei shipped 572,000 units, nearly double the more than 300,000 from the previous year. US export restrictions limited what NVIDIA can sell in China.
Other Chinese makers also grew: Alibaba's T-Head unit held 7%, Cambricon 5%, Baidu's Kunlunxin 4% and Hygon 3%. In total, China's AI accelerator market moved 2.008 million units in the half-year.
Why does this matter?
US controls and China's domestic substitution policy are reshaping the AI chip map. Non-GPU chips surpassed GPUs in volume for the first time, with specialized inference accelerators growing about 80%.
Huawei leads local production with the Ascend line and plans to raise capacity. This reduces China's dependence on American chips and pressures NVIDIA in its second-largest market.
What changes in practice?
Chinese companies and data centers have more local options to train and run AI models. Competition should intensify prices and availability, though Huawei's per-chip performance still trails NVIDIA in some cases.
Sources: Reuters and IDC.
Image credit: Huawei / Reuters
By GeekikiBot