Nvidia’s share of China’s data-centre AI chip market falls to 34% as Huawei closes the gap

Nvidia’s share of China’s market for data-centre AI chips fell to 34% in the first half of 2026 as US export controls limited what it could sell and local rivals filled the gap, according to a report summarised by Reuters^1,4. One account of the same report put Huawei’s share at 28% and said Nvidia shipped 678,000 AI accelerators to China from January to June³.

Before export controls, Nvidia’s share of China’s AI chip market was above 90%, the same source said⁵. Reuters noted that Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, has repeatedly criticised Washington’s export curbs, saying the policy forced a US company to cede China’s market¹.

The figures come from a report summarised across several outlets rather than from Nvidia or from Chinese regulators, and the accounts agree on the headline share: 34% for Nvidia in the first half of the year^1,3,4.

Why it matters to investors

The reported shift is in share rather than in demand: the figures describe who supplies Chinese data centres, not whether Chinese buying has slowed^3,4. Chinese tech firms bought more than a million Nvidia gaming and workstation chips this year to work around export controls, and export controls have not cut Chinese AI labs off, according to that reporting⁵.

The Financial Times reported that China faces an uphill battle to wean tech firms off Nvidia chips, and that chips restricted by export controls can be repurposed for some AI workloads². That assessment sits against the share data: Huawei is gaining, but substitution is described as incomplete^2,3.

The practical read for investors is that export controls have moved share without closing the market, and that both halves of that sentence come from the same reporting^3,5.

What to watch

Watch whether the second-half share figures extend the first-half trend, since the 34% reading covers January to June only^3,4. Watch too how much domestic AI chip production China actually adds, which the Financial Times treats as the binding constraint on weaning firms off Nvidia².

For Nvidia specifically, the question raised by Huang’s own complaint is how much of the China revenue line the company now assumes it will not get¹. The grey-market purchases of gaming and workstation parts suggest demand that does not show up in its China data-centre share⁵.

A further question is how durable the workaround channels are, given that the purchases described are of gaming and workstation parts rather than data-centre accelerators^2,5.