Huawei narrows gap as Nvidia's share of China AI chip market drops to 34%
Nvidia shipped 678,000 AI accelerators in China in the first half of 2026, a 34% share, while Huawei's 572,000 units gave it 28%, IDC data show.
Nvidia held 34% of China's market for data-centre AI accelerators in the first six months of 2026, according to a report by research firm IDC that came to light on 13 October 2026. Huawei captured 28%, cutting deeply into the US chipmaker's lead as Washington's export controls limited what Nvidia can sell in the country.
IDC's figures show Nvidia delivered 678,000 accelerators in China between January and June, 44% fewer than in the same period of 2025. Huawei's shipments rose to 572,000 from just over 300,000 a year earlier. Such chips are used both to train AI models and to run them once trained.
Further down the ranking, Alibaba's chip-design arm T-Head took 7%, Cambricon 5%, Baidu-owned Kunlunxin 4% and Hygon 3%. Of the 11 Chinese suppliers IDC follows, nine sold more units than a year before.
Specialised chips overtake GPUs
Overall shipments reached 2.008 million units in the half. Graphics processing units, the workhorse of model training, dropped 26% to 991,000, which IDC attributed to the narrow range of products cleared for sale in mainland China. Other accelerators built for particular AI workloads jumped almost 80% to 1.016 million, surpassing GPUs by volume. Huawei, T-Head, Kunlunxin and Cambricon together supplied 95% of that segment, which IDC said is gaining traction among government bodies, internet firms and telecom operators.
IDC did not break down which Nvidia products make up its 34% share, nor whether it counts top-tier chips such as the B200 and B300. Those parts are banned from export to China but have reportedly been smuggled in. Nvidia did not answer a request for comment.
Export curbs and domestic substitution
The shift reflects pressure from both governments. The US has blocked Chinese access to Nvidia's most advanced AI chips, while Beijing promotes home-grown alternatives and requires companies to obtain approval before importing compliant Nvidia hardware. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has repeatedly argued that the US restrictions effectively hand China's $50 billion AI chip market to Huawei.
According to IDC, the contest is moving away from raw single-chip performance towards system-level strength, such as how efficiently chips cooperate inside large computing clusters. The firm forecasts total accelerator shipments in China will grow 19% this year, even as GPU shipments decline 9%.