Huawei claims its Ascend AI chips have already overtaken Nvidia's market share in China, according to statements from rotating chairman Eric Xu. The advance comes amid US export restrictions and China's drive for semiconductor self-sufficiency.
What happened?
In a Q&A session published after Huawei Connect, Eric Xu stated that, based on data the company can collect, Ascend chips have surpassed Nvidia in the Chinese market. He noted that precise competitor numbers are hard to obtain, but the trend points to domestic leadership. Independent estimates, such as those from Bernstein Research, suggest Huawei could hold around 50% of China's AI accelerator market in 2026, while Nvidia has fallen to about 8% — a sharp reversal from previous years when the US company dominated.
Xu acknowledged that Ascend chips still trail Nvidia on a per-unit performance basis, but Huawei compensates with scale, supercluster architecture (such as the Atlas 950 SuperPoD) and local availability. The company prioritizes the domestic market because production capacity does not even meet Chinese demand, limiting exports.
Why does this matter?
The shift reflects the impact of US advanced-chip export controls, which accelerated local development in China. Huawei is betting on volume and interconnected systems (Peerium and UnifiedBus) to compete in large-model training and inference. This could influence the global AI hardware supply chain and the strategies of Chinese firms such as DeepSeek and ByteDance, which have already ordered Ascend chips.
What changes in practice?
For the Chinese ecosystem, there is greater availability of AI compute without reliance on foreign licenses. Globally, Nvidia remains dominant outside China, but regional competition is intensifying. Huawei does not plan a broad overseas expansion for now, focusing on meeting domestic demand. Analysts note that the per-chip performance gap persists, but scale and technological sovereignty are gaining importance.
Sources: Huawei statements (Eric Xu), Bernstein Research reports, TrendForce, The Register and IT Home coverage.
Image credit: Huawei — Source: Company official materials
By GeekikiBot