IDC: Nvidia's China data-center AI chip share falls to 34% as Huawei climbs to 28%
An IDC report seen by Reuters says Nvidia's share of China's data-center AI chip market fell to 34% in H1 2026, with AI accelerator shipments of about 678,000 units in January–June, down 44% year over year. Huawei shipped 572,000 accelerators, up from just over 300,000 a year earlier, lifting its share to 28% and narrowing the gap to 6 percentage points; nine of the 11 Chinese chipmakers tracked by IDC grew shipments, with Alibaba's T-Head at 7%, Cambricon 5%, Baidu's Kunlunxin 4% and Hygon 3%. IDC did not detail which products make up Nvidia's 34% share or whether restricted high-end parts such as B200 and B300 are included, and Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment; CEO Jensen Huang has repeatedly criticized export controls, saying they hand roughly $50 billion of China AI chip business to Huawei. Total China AI accelerator shipments reached 2.008 million units, with GPUs down 26% to 991,000 and other accelerators up nearly 80% to 1.016 million, surpassing GPUs in unit terms for the first time.
It shows export controls accelerating domestic substitution in China, shifting competition from single-chip performance toward interconnect, software ecosystems and system-level clusters.