Nvidia’s share of China’s data center AI chip market fell to 34 percent in the first half of 2026, according to an IDC report seen by Reuters. Nvidia shipped 678,000 AI accelerators in China from January through June, down 44 percent from a year earlier.
Huawei shipped 572,000 accelerators in the same period, up from more than 300,000 a year earlier, giving it a 28 percent share. Alibaba’s chip design unit T-Head held 7 percent, followed by Cambricon at 5 percent, Baidu’s Kunlunxin at 4 percent and Hygon at 3 percent. Nine of the 11 Chinese chipmakers IDC tracks increased their shipments from a year earlier.
IDC’s full-year figures for 2025, reported in April, counted about 4 million AI accelerator cards shipped in China. Nvidia supplied about 2.2 million of them, a 55 percent share, while Chinese vendors together took about 41 percent. Huawei led the domestic group with about 812,000 units, followed by T-Head with about 265,000.
Total AI accelerator shipments in China reached 2.008 million units in the first half. GPU shipments fell 26 percent to 991,000 units, which IDC attributed to limited supplies of products eligible for sale in mainland China.
Shipments of other types of AI accelerators rose nearly 80 percent to 1.016 million units, overtaking GPUs by volume. Huawei, T-Head, Kunlunxin and Cambricon accounted for 95 percent of that non-GPU segment, which IDC said is being adopted by government agencies, internet companies and telecommunications providers.
US export controls bar Nvidia from selling its most advanced AI chips in China. IDC did not specify which Nvidia products made up its 34 percent share, or whether the figure included chips such as the B200 and B300. Those processors are barred from export to China, though some have been smuggled into the country.
On October 1, federal agents arrested the owner of a California company accused of routing more than $300 million in export-controlled GPU servers to buyers in China through Malaysia and Singapore.
Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment on the IDC figures. Chief Executive Jensen Huang has repeatedly criticized US export restrictions, saying they forced the company to cede China’s $50 billion AI chip market to Huawei.
DeepSeek and Huawei have released open-source tools that adapt DeepSeek’s computing and communication libraries to Huawei’s Ascend processors, and Alibaba unveiled its Zhenwu V900 AI processor, with commercial release planned for early 2027.
IDC said competition in China’s market is shifting from the performance of individual chips toward system-level capability, including how chips work together in large clusters.
IDC expects total AI accelerator shipments in China to grow 19 percent in 2026, while GPU shipments decline 9 percent.
Sources: Reuters, Reuters (April), TechNode
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team