Chinese GPU and AI chipmakers captured nearly 41% of China’s AI accelerator server market in 2025. It represents one of the sharpest erosions of Nvidia’s (NVDA) position in a key overseas market on record.
The data come from an IDC report reviewed by Reuters. Total AI accelerator card shipments in China reached approximately 4 million units last year across Nvidia, AMD (AMD), and Chinese vendors. Nvidia shipped about 2.2 million cards and held a 55% share. But that is a sharp retreat from the near-total dominance it held just a few years ago.
The shift accelerated as Beijing pushed government agencies and companies to adopt domestic alternatives. Successive waves of U.S. export controls had already cut China off from Nvidia’s most advanced products.
Who is taking Nvidia’s share?
Huawei Technologies led all Chinese vendors by a wide margin. It shipped about 812,000 chips, roughly half of all domestically branded shipments, according to Reuters’ reporting on the IDC data.
Alibaba’s chip design unit T-Head ranked second with approximately 265,000 cards. Baidu’s Kunlunxin and Cambricon each shipped in the neighborhood of 116,000 cards, placing them jointly third.
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The IDC report noted that in 2025, China’s central government launched a new wave of AI infrastructure spending. Local governments accelerated intelligent computing centers across provinces. Many carried implicit directives to “buy Chinese.”
GPU startups MetaX, Iluvatar CoreX, and Hygon also gained ground, accounting for smaller but growing slices of the market.
Nvidia’s own words tell the story
Nvidia CFO Colette Kress addressed the China situation on the company’s Q4 fiscal 2026 earnings call in February. Her words were 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 said, according to The Register. “We do not know whether any imports will be allowed into China.”
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She also warned about the competitive threat. “Our competitors in China, bolstered by recent IPOs, are making progress,” Kress said. They “have the potential to disrupt the structure of the global AI industry over the long term.”
China once accounted for between 20% and 25% of Nvidia’s data-center revenue. That segment generated more than $41 billion in fiscal year 2025. Even after export controls tightened, China still contributed 13% of Nvidia’s total revenue in fiscal 2025, per the company’s own disclosures.
That figure has since fallen further.
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Huawei is scaling fast
Huawei’s Ascend 910C has become the default chip for Chinese AI developers locked out of Nvidia’s products. It combines two older 910B processors into a single unit.
On a per-chip basis, it delivers roughly 60% of Nvidia’s H100 performance, according to industry analysts. It requires more power and silicon to match H100 output at the system level, but Chinese companies are absorbing that cost.
Huawei is scaling aggressively. Bloomberg reported the company aims to produce 600,000 Ascend 910C units in 2026. That is roughly double its prior-year output. Including other Ascend models, Huawei could distribute up to 1.6 million dies in 2026.
Huawei has also built a full-stack system called the CloudMatrix 384. It links 384 Ascend 910C processors across 16 racks.
Analysts at Counterpoint Research found the cluster outperformed Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 on some metrics. The trade-off is power consumption, roughly four times that of the Nvidia system.
How China’s AI chip market has shifted:
- Nvidia held approximately 66% of China’s AI chip market in 2024, per Bernstein Research cited by TMTPost.
- Chinese vendors reached 41% unit share in 2025, per IDC data reviewed by Reuters.
- Bernstein projects Nvidia’s share could fall to about 8% in 2026 as domestic suppliers approach 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 trying to get back in
Nvidia has not walked away from China. At GTC 2026 in March, CEO Jensen Huang said the company had received purchase orders. It was “in the process of restarting our manufacturing” for H200 chips bound for China, CNBC reported.
Huang has also been lobbying for the U.S. to eventually allow Blackwell chip sales to China. He wants that to happen once the more advanced Vera Rubin platform is widely deployed domestically.
At GTC, he estimated the Chinese AI chip market would have been worth approximately $50 billion in 2025, had Nvidia been able to sell freely.
But Washington is only half the problem. Beijing has not formally approved H200 imports. The Chinese government continues pushing domestic companies toward homegrown AI infrastructure, regardless of what U.S. companies are permitted to sell.
“Huawei is still likely to remain ahead of other Nvidia alternatives in China’s AI processor and GPU market,” said Wei Sun, principal analyst at Counterpoint Research. “The reason is not just any single chip, but the stack. That matters more than headline specs.”
For Nvidia, the challenge is no longer only about export rules. It is about whether Chinese developers who spent two years building workflows around domestic hardware will switch back, even when they are allowed to.
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