Chinese language GPU and AI chipmakers captured practically 41% of China’s AI accelerator server market in 2025. It represents one of many sharpest erosions of Nvidia’s (NVDA) place in a key abroad market on document.
The information come from an IDC report reviewed by Reuters. Complete AI accelerator card shipments in China reached roughly 4 million models final yr throughout Nvidia, AMD (AMD), and Chinese language distributors. Nvidia shipped about 2.2 million playing cards and held a 55% share. However that may be a sharp retreat from the near-total dominance it held just some years in the past.
The shift accelerated as Beijing pushed authorities companies and firms to undertake home options. Successive waves of U.S. export controls had already reduce China off from Nvidia’s most superior merchandise.
Who’s taking Nvidia’s share?
Huawei Applied sciences led all Chinese language distributors by a large margin. It shipped about 812,000 chips, roughly half of all domestically branded shipments, based on Reuters’ reporting on the IDC information.
Alibaba’s chip design unit T-Head ranked second with roughly 265,000 playing cards. Baidu’s Kunlunxin and Cambricon every shipped within the neighborhood of 116,000 playing cards, inserting them collectively third.
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The IDC report famous that in 2025, China’s central authorities launched a brand new wave of AI infrastructure spending. Native governments accelerated clever computing facilities throughout provinces. Many carried implicit directives to “buy Chinese.”
GPU startups MetaX, Iluvatar CoreX, and Hygon additionally gained floor, accounting for smaller however rising slices of the market.
Nvidia’s personal phrases inform the story
Nvidia CFO Colette Kress addressed the China state of affairs on the corporate’s This fall fiscal 2026 earnings name in February. Her phrases had been direct.
“While small amounts of H200 products for China-based customers were approved by the U.S. government, we have yet to generate any revenue,” Kress mentioned, based on The Register. “We do not know whether any imports will be allowed into China.”
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She additionally warned concerning the aggressive risk. “Our competitors in China, bolstered by recent IPOs, are making progress,” Kress mentioned. They “have the potential to disrupt the structure of the global AI industry over the long term.”
China as soon as accounted for between 20% and 25% of Nvidia’s data-center income. That phase generated greater than $41 billion in fiscal yr 2025. Even after export controls tightened, China nonetheless contributed 13% of Nvidia’s complete income in fiscal 2025, per the corporate’s personal disclosures.
That determine has since fallen additional.
Nvidia rivals are gaining floor.
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Huawei is scaling quick
Huawei’s Ascend 910C has develop into the default chip for Chinese language AI builders locked out of Nvidia’s merchandise. It combines two older 910B processors right into a single unit.
On a per-chip foundation, it delivers roughly 60% of Nvidia’s H100 efficiency, based on trade analysts. It requires extra energy and silicon to match H100 output on the system stage, however Chinese language firms are absorbing that price.
Huawei is scaling aggressively. Bloomberg reported the corporate goals to provide 600,000 Ascend 910C models in 2026. That’s roughly double its prior-year output. Together with different Ascend fashions, Huawei might distribute as much as 1.6 million dies in 2026.
Huawei has additionally constructed a full-stack system referred to as the CloudMatrix 384. It hyperlinks 384 Ascend 910C processors throughout 16 racks.
Analysts at Counterpoint Analysis discovered the cluster outperformed Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 on some metrics. The trade-off is energy consumption, roughly 4 occasions that of the Nvidia system.
How China’s AI chip market has shifted:
- Nvidia held roughly 66% of China’s AI chip market in 2024, per Bernstein Analysis cited by TMTPost.
- Chinese language distributors reached 41% unit share in 2025, per IDC information reviewed by Reuters.
- Bernstein tasks Nvidia’s share might fall to about 8% in 2026 as home suppliers strategy 80% collectively, per CNBC.
- China’s AI chip localization ratio is projected to surge from 17% in 2023 to 55% by 2027, per Bernstein.
Nvidia is attempting to get again in
Nvidia has not walked away from China. At GTC 2026 in March, CEO Jensen Huang mentioned the corporate had obtained buy orders. It was “in the process of restarting our manufacturing” for H200 chips sure for China, CNBC reported.
Huang has additionally been lobbying for the U.S. to finally permit Blackwell chip gross sales to China. He needs that to occur as soon as the extra superior Vera Rubin platform is broadly deployed domestically.
At GTC, he estimated the Chinese language AI chip market would have been price roughly $50 billion in 2025, had Nvidia been capable of promote freely.
However Washington is barely half the issue. Beijing has not formally authorized H200 imports. The Chinese language authorities continues pushing home firms towards homegrown AI infrastructure, no matter what U.S. firms are permitted to promote.
“Huawei is still likely to remain ahead of other Nvidia alternatives in China’s AI processor and GPU market,” mentioned Wei Solar, principal analyst at Counterpoint Analysis. “The reason is not just any single chip, but the stack. That matters more than headline specs.”
For Nvidia, the problem is not solely about export guidelines. It’s about whether or not Chinese language builders who spent two years constructing workflows round home {hardware} will swap again, even when they’re allowed to.
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