NVIDIA's market share in China dropped to zero after US export controls, enabling Huawei to capture roughly 60% of the Chinese AI chip market by end of 2026.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stated that NVIDIA's market share for AI accelerators in China has 'dropped to zero.' Two years prior, NVIDIA owned between 66% and 95% of the Chinese AI GPU market. In April 2025, the Trump administration restricted the H20, a chip NVIDIA built specifically for the Chinese market, and NVIDIA took a $5.5B inventory charge that quarter.

Huawei's Ascend 950PR processor, which entered mass production in March 2026, is purpose-built for inference (the step where an AI produces answers from trained models) rather than training. Huawei leverages its networking expertise to link thousands of chips into clusters, optimizing for system-level performance. AI-chip revenue at Huawei is forecast to reach approximately $12B in 2026, up 60% YoY.

Cambricon, a domestic Chinese chip competitor, posted $423M in revenue in Q1 2026 with 160% YoY growth and net profit up 185%, signaling the domestic Chinese chip ecosystem is already generating earnings. McKinsey estimates 30–40% of all global AI spending will be sovereignty-influenced by 2030, a $500B–$600B market.