IDC numbers reported by Reuters show Nvidia clinging to first place in China’s AI accelerator market, though its lead has shrunk dramatically. During the first half of 2026 the American chip designer moved about 678,000 accelerators into mainland China, a 44 percent drop from a year earlier. That translates to a 34 percent market share.
Over the same six months Huawei shipped 572,000 units — nearly twice what it managed a year before — giving it 28 percent. Only six percentage points now separate the two suppliers.
And the erosion reaches past Huawei. Cambricon claimed 5 percent, Alibaba’s T-Head 7 percent, Baidu’s Kunlunxin 4 percent and Hygon 3 percent. Of the eleven Chinese vendors IDC monitored, nine shipped more than a year earlier.
China’s total accelerator shipments came to 2.008 million units. The supply of products China legally permits to be sold stayed tight, and graphics processors — the mainstay for training models — slid 26 percent to 991,000 units. Meanwhile non-GPU accelerators built for inference climbed almost 80 percent to 1.016 million, moving ahead of GPUs for the first time ever. Four domestic vendors command 95 percent of that slice.
Across the full year, IDC anticipates total accelerators in China will grow 19 percent even as GPU shipments slip 9 percent. Competition, the research firm said, is shifting away from single-chip throughput toward system-level performance in large clusters.
Washington’s export restrictions handed Huawei a $50 billion market, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has argued repeatedly.
