Analysis
Huawei's rotating chairman Eric Xu claimed earlier this month that the company's Ascend chip market share "should be bigger than Nvidia's" in China's AI chip market, a claim The Register examined again this week as fresh data continues to back up the direction, if not Xu's exact framing. Xu offered no supporting figures for the specific "bigger than Nvidia's" claim, but independent estimates increasingly point the same way.
The Numbers Behind The Claim
According to Tom's Hardware, citing Financial Times reporting, Huawei is on track to capture the largest share of China's AI chip market in 2026, with AI chip revenue expected to surge to roughly $12 billion this year, up from $7.5 billion in 2025 -- a jump of more than 60%. Analysts at the Mercator Institute for China Studies estimate Nvidia has fallen to around 8% market share in China, with Huawei now near 50%, a dramatic reversal from a market Nvidia dominated just a few years ago.
Why This Is Happening Now
The shift is driven by a combination of US export controls limiting which Nvidia chips can legally reach Chinese customers, and Beijing's own push for AI self-sufficiency, actively steering domestic firms away from foreign silicon where a viable local alternative exists. Xu himself has said Huawei can't produce enough AI computing equipment to meet domestic demand and is limiting overseas sales as a result -- a supply constraint, not a demand problem, which is a very different competitive position than a company struggling to sell.
Competitive Landscape, And The Caveat That Matters
Huawei's Ascend 950 series and large AI clusters now underpin a meaningful share of China's AI infrastructure, and Pulse has tracked Huawei's Ascend 960DT chip entering the China-Nvidia race as part of that buildout, alongside DeepSeek's move toward Huawei chips amid export controls. But market-share claims measured in units sold inside China say nothing about capability at the frontier: Huawei's chips still lag Nvidia's most advanced parts for training the largest, most capable models, meaning the split increasingly looks like domestic volume for Huawei and frontier-capability training for whoever can still access Nvidia's top-end chips -- inside China or out.
For US chipmakers, the real signal isn't that Huawei is winning a popularity contest in China -- it's that the addressable market Nvidia can legally sell into there just keeps shrinking, market share claims aside.