Nvidia market share in China falls to less than 60% — Chinese chip makers deliver 1.65 million AI GPUs as the government pushes data centers to use domestic chips

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Jensen won't be happy.

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(Image credit: Getty / Cheng Xin)

Chinese semiconductor firms have taken a big chunk of the domestic market, claiming 41% of the local AI server market and delivering 1.65 million AI GPUs out of a total of 4 million units in 2025. IDC numbers reported by Reuters claim that Nvidia still leads with a 55% market share, shipping an estimated 2.2 million cards, but this is a major contraction compared to the company’s claimed 95% market share before sanctions.

Huawei is reported to be the big winner among the Chinese chipmakers, shipping around 812,000 AI chips or nearly 20% of the market. The Shenzhen-based firm is continuing development of AI processors, with the company launching its Atlas 350 AI accelerator last week, which is claimed to have nearly three times the performance of Nvidia H20 chips. T-Head, which is owned by Alibaba, the e-commerce platform widely known as China’s Amazon, holds a distant third place with 256,000 units sold.

AMD sits just outside of the top three chipmakers in China, shipping 160,000 units for a 4% share of the domestic AI chip market. Baidu’s Kunlunxin AI chip subsidiary and Chinese AI chip maker Cambricon round out the top five, with each company delivering 116,000 cards.

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Trump reversed the ban on the H20 and MI308 in July 2025, but Chinese companies were told to stop ordering Nvidia’s chips after U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s “addition” comments during an interview. In December 2025, Trump made a complete U-turn and finally allowed Nvidia to ship the H200 to China, but it took several months before Chinese companies were allowed to order the U.S.-only chips, and only for specific institutions and applications.

Beijing is facing a dilemma as it wants to support its domestic chip industry but also wants its AI tech companies to remain competitive on the global stage. While Chinese chip makers have advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years, it still lags five to ten years in AI data center chips compared to Nvidia and AMD. Despite that, the Chinese government’s efforts seem to be paying off, as seen by the increasing market share of local chip makers.

We have yet to see if Washington’s move to allow Nvidia to sell its H200 chips to China will see the company regain its lost market share in 2026. But even if Chinese companies are eager to purchase these AI GPUs en masse, Beijing’s effort to redirect some of the demand towards domestic semiconductors will likely mean that Nvidia would have a hard time returning to pre-sanctions market share.

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Jowi Morales
Jowi Morales
Contributing Writer

Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

12 Comments Comment from the forums
  • -Fran-
    If Jensen has any self awareness, then he'll blame himself first and foremost for this.

    If not, well, he'll be just a stereotypical CEO with narcissistic personality disorder. Plenty of those to pass around.

    Regards.
    Reply
  • ekio
    The long term vision of China's government will be taught in history books.
    They instruct their new generation instead of allowing onlyfans and tiktok generational decay boosters.
    They make domestic tech a priority instead of buying bulk of overpriced shit from abroad.
    They push for their industry to export their products and become world leading groups.

    They will crush the Occident so much, just because their leaders are not corrupted mops like in Canada and Europe.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    ekio said:
    The long term vision of China's government will be taught in history books.
    Yes, but not the narrative you claim. They repeatedly broke fair trade rules and worked around WTO court rulings at every turn. They used practices like dumping to corner the market in industries like rare earth minerals. They used forced technology transfer & other means to help themselves to others' IP. They swindled foreign investors who helped provide seed funding of their industries. Finally, they restricted foreign access to their domestic markets, so that their own domestic firms had stable revenue streams to fuel their growth. They were breaking all the rules long before Trump came along. His ascendancy was partly a reaction to that.
    Reply
  • Stomx
    bit_user said:
    Yes, but not
    Mokingbird :).
    Do TH pay you for this?
    Reply
  • chaos215bar2
    -Fran- said:
    If Jensen has any self awareness, then he'll blame himself first and foremost for this.
    Jensen is responsible for unilaterally determining US and China's trade policy?

    ekio said:
    They will crush the Occident so much, just because their leaders are not corrupted mops like in Canada and Europe.
    China's government is, for the moment, in the enviable position of being able to sweep some pretty egregious violations of international trade policy and even basic human rights under the rug as it mostly manages to improve conditions sufficiently for the majority of its citizens that they don't notice and position itself in a sufficiently advantageous position internationally that other countries can't afford not to do business with it.

    But claiming the CCP is neither corrupt nor self-serving is almost hilarious. Any country or party whose leadership is as paranoid as China's is both fully aware of what they're doing and exactly how hard it will blow back on them the moment they aren't able to exercise iron-fisted control. Unless China's political situation changes completely, it's only a matter of time until the inevitable happens.

    None of that of course diminishes their incredible achievements in education and industrialization, but those policy successes alone will only take China so far.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    I'm not really sure how reliable these figures are in the first place. There have been so many shifting restrictions that many Chinese companies circumvented normal means to still leverage nvidia hardware. Sure it might look that way on paper, but there's no way that nvidia doesn't still have close to the same market share in China as before in real world terms.
    Reply
  • alrighty_then
    Surprised the outlawed US tech is still the majority.

    I reckon China doesn't need the physical chips anyway as they can just rent them from providers abroad to get all the benefits while sidestepping the law.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Stomx said:
    Do TH pay you for this?
    No, I'd be too expensive.
    Reply
  • dynamicreflect

    Speak of long term, when is it time to update to chatgpt 5?
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    chaos215bar2 said:
    Jensen is responsible for unilaterally determining US and China's trade policy?
    Strawman.

    This is specifically to China not wanting to use nVidia GPUs and turn to domestic. Jensen had a big hand in that. If you can't see it, that's fine.

    Regards.
    Reply