Huawei’s rotating chairman, Eric Xu, says the company’s Ascend accelerators have outsold Nvidia in China, arguing that guaranteed supply matters more to buyers than raw performance.
“It’s pretty hard to collect data about the market share of Nvidia in China, but based on the data we have collected, Ascend has surpassed Nvidia,” Xu said. He added that Chinese customers would not accept a future where outsiders decide whether they can buy certain products.
The claim follows years of export whipsaw. Washington imposed licensing rules on China-spec accelerators in 2025, later reversing course and taking a cut of certain sales, but the earlier blockade had already pushed Beijing to steer data center operators toward domestic silicon.
Xu concedes the hardware gap. Huawei’s parts trail Nvidia and AMD on paper, he said, though assured supply offsets that. The company is deploying a 256,000-card Atlas SuperCluster and is designing a newer architecture for multi-trillion-parameter models.
Huawei has no plans for a full international push and says it cannot meet Chinese demand, let alone export at scale. For now the contest is domestic, where the argument is reliability rather than benchmarks.
