Huawei says its Ascend AI chips have overtaken Nvidia's in China. It hasn't said by how much.
Rotating chairman Eric Xu conceded at Huawei Connect last month that Nvidia's China share is hard to pin down, but said Huawei's own data puts Ascend ahead. Bernstein forecasts about 50% for Huawei and 8% for Nvidia this year. It's what Jensen Huang has warned about since export controls hit a market where, he says, Nvidia once held about 95%.
Xu says the bottleneck is the process nodes available in mainland China, not chip design, so Huawei links large numbers of chips into what it calls SuperPoDs. Capacity is the other limit. Huawei can't meet demand at home, he says, so it has no plans for a full push abroad, though it's testing and shipping small volumes to several countries with "very strong demand."
For scale: DeepSeek reportedly plans to deploy at least 160,000 Ascend 950DT chips at a data center in Inner Mongolia.