Nvidia’s China AI-chip share falls to 34% as Huawei closes the gap — new IDC data
Nvidia’s share of China’s data-centre AI chip market fell to 34% in the first half of 2026, while Huawei surged to 28% — according to IDC data seen by Reuters, which published its findings Tuesday. It is the clearest sign yet that US export controls are handing the world’s second-largest AI hardware market to domestic rivals.
Nvidia shipped roughly 678,000 AI accelerators in China between January and June, down about 44% from a year earlier, IDC found. Huawei shipped 572,000 units, up from more than 300,000 in the same period last year — nearly doubling its volume and lifting its share to 28%, just six points behind Nvidia.
The domestic bench is deep — and growing
The shift is not just a two-horse race. Alibaba’s chip-design unit T-Head held 7% of the market, followed by Cambricon at 5%, Baidu’s Kunlunxin at 4% and Hygon at 3%. Nine of the 11 Chinese chipmakers tracked by IDC increased shipments year over year, a breadth that suggests import substitution is becoming systemic rather than episodic.
In total, China bought 2.008 million AI accelerators in the first half. GPU shipments — the chips most widely used to train AI models — fell 26% to 991,000 units, as supplies eligible for sale in mainland China stayed limited, IDC said.
Export controls did this
The mechanism is Washington’s restriction on China’s access to Nvidia’s most powerful AI chips, which has narrowed the range of products the US chipmaker can sell there. Beijing, meanwhile, has promoted domestic alternatives and now requires Chinese companies to seek approval to import compliant Nvidia chips — a double squeeze on Nvidia’s position.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has repeatedly criticised the export curbs, saying the policy forced a US company to cede China’s $50 billion AI chip market to Huawei. Nvidia did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment on the IDC figures.
One caveat in the data: IDC did not specify which Nvidia products make up its 34% figure, or whether it includes cutting-edge chips like the B200 and B300 — barred from export to China but widely reported to have been smuggled into the country.
What it means
The numbers put a hard figure on a trend investors have been pricing in all year: the decoupling of the AI hardware supply chain. With Huawei and a deep bench of domestic designers all gaining volume while Nvidia’s GPU supply stays constrained, China’s AI buildout is increasingly running on home-grown silicon — and the performance gap, once the industry’s core assumption, is no longer doing the explaining.