Here is a market share number that took a long detour to reach the page. Nvidia held 34 percent of China's market for data center AI chips in the first half of 2026, according to an IDC report that Reuters says it has seen. Nvidia shipped 678,000 AI accelerators into China between January and June, down 44 percent from a year earlier. Huawei shipped 572,000, up from more than 300,000, and took 28 percent.
An AI accelerator is a chip built to do the one kind of arithmetic that training and running a model consists of, over and over, very fast. A GPU is the familiar kind. The category also includes chips designed for a narrower job, such as running a model that has already been trained, and that distinction turns out to be most of the story.
The reason for the slide is no mystery, and Reuters lays out both halves of it. Washington has restricted China's access to Nvidia's most powerful chips, so the US company can sell only a narrowed menu there. Beijing has promoted domestic alternatives and now requires Chinese companies to seek approval before importing the Nvidia chips that are still permitted. Squeezed from both ends, a 44 percent volume drop reads less as a surprise than as arithmetic.
Jensen Huang has said as much, repeatedly. Reuters notes that Nvidia's chief executive has argued the export curbs 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.
Now the part the engineers will want. Total accelerator shipments in China reached 2.008 million units in the half. GPU shipments fell 26 percent to 991,000 units. Shipments of everything else rose nearly 80 percent to 1.016 million, which means non-GPU accelerators outsold GPUs in China for the period. Huawei, Alibaba's chip unit T-Head, Baidu's Kunlunxin and Cambricon together accounted for 95 percent of that non-GPU segment, which IDC said was being adopted by government agencies, internet companies and telecoms providers.
Further down the table, T-Head held 7 percent of the whole market, Cambricon 5 percent, Kunlunxin 4 percent and Hygon 3 percent. Nine of the 11 Chinese chipmakers IDC tracks increased shipments from a year earlier.
A few caveats, and they matter. IDC did not say which Nvidia products make up the 34 percent, or whether the count includes parts such as the B200 and B300, which are barred from export to China and which Reuters reports have been smuggled in regardless. The report itself is not public. Every figure here comes from the Reuters account of it, I have not been able to read IDC's methodology, and a research firm's share figure is an estimate, not a census.
What Huawei is closing the gap with is something we have followed. Its Ascend 960DT accelerator has been pulled forward to early 2027, three quarters ahead of its published roadmap, and it used its Huawei Connect keynote to show a 4,096-chip pod built on its own optical interconnect, the part export controls make hardest to buy. IDC's own reading is that competition is shifting from the performance of a single chip to how well chips work together in a large computing cluster, which is a polite way of saying the fight has moved to the plumbing.
IDC expects total accelerator shipments in China to grow 19 percent this year even as GPU shipments fall 9 percent. Read together, the bet is clear: the Chinese market keeps growing, and on IDC's forecast the growth goes to chips Nvidia does not make.
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