Nvidia's China Leg: IDC Puts the Official Share at 34% and Falling — Huawei at 28% and Non-GPU Accelerators Now Outship GPUs

Nvidia's China Leg: IDC Puts the Official Share at 34% and Falling — Huawei at 28% and Non-GPU Accelerators Now Outship GPUs

Update 2026-10-14: the scale of the official China retreat is now quantified by IDC data seen by Reuters (Oct 13): "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 restricted supplies of its products and domestic rivals led by Huawei gained ground.¹"

The numbers:

• Nvidia shipped 678,000 AI accelerators in China from January through June — down 44% from a year earlier (Reuters/IDC).
• Huawei shipped 572,000, up from more than 300,000 a year earlier — a 28% share, narrowing the gap with Nvidia to six points.
• Alibaba's T-Head held 7%, Cambricon 5%, Baidu's Kunlunxin 4%, Hygon 3%; nine of the 11 Chinese chipmakers IDC tracked increased shipments.
• Total China AI-accelerator shipments reached 2.008M units in H1. GPUs fell 26% to 991,000 units, while "shipments of other AI accelerators rose nearly 80 percent to 1.016 million units, overtaking GPUs by volume" — Huawei, T-Head, Kunlunxin and Cambricon together hold 95% of that non-GPU segment.
• IDC expects total China accelerator shipments to grow 19% this year even as GPU shipments fall 9%.

Context: IDC did not specify which Nvidia products make up the 34% share or whether smuggled B200/B300 are included — the gray channel documented in the prior revision (more than 1M gaming and workstation chips bought this year per the FT) sits outside these official figures. Jensen Huang has "repeatedly criticised Washington's export curbs, saying the policy forced a US company to cede China's $50 billion AI chip market to Huawei" (Reuters).

What it means: the China leg of the capex story is being lost at the official level — not because demand disappeared (total shipments +19% in 2026) but because export controls and Beijing's domestic-substitution push are converting it into a domestic Huawei-led market. The volume mix shift matters as much as the share: non-GPU accelerators now outship GPUs in China, evidence that the second-largest chip market is structurally organizing around non-Nvidia silicon. The reopening path (RTX Pro 5500 channel, ByteDance's planned 1M-unit order) remains the swing factor — checked at the Nov 18 earnings watch.