{
  "id": 11033749,
  "title": "Huawei boss claims homegrown AI chip sales top Nvidia in China",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/30/huawei-boss-claims-homegrown-ai-chip-sales-top-nvidia-in-china-11033749",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-09-30T20:16:14.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The Register",
    "slug": "the-register",
    "url": "https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/09/30/huawei-boss-claims-homegrown-ai-chip-sales-top-nvidia-in-china/5300266"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "In a recent Q&A release, Huawei's Chairman Eric Xu claimed that the Chinese company's Ascend line of neural processing units (NPUs) had surpassed Nvidia in market share within China. While it's difficult to gather exact data on Nvidia's market share in the country, Xu stated that the company has collected evidence suggesting Ascend's dominance. Chinese consumers are eager for access to technology, and they will not tolerate being left behind in the AI race. The Trump administration's export control policies have not hindered Huawei's progress in this market.\n\nThe U.S. government initially imposed new licensing requirements on Nvidia and AMD's China-spec accelerators in April 2025, but reversed course later that summer. The administration reached an agreement to share in a portion of certain chip sales to China. By late 2025, the restrictions had been further eased, allowing Nvidia to sell its more advanced H200-series parts to selected Chinese customers for the first time. Despite the administration's approval, initial shipments of H200s to China amounted to less than 1% of the company's datacenter revenues.\n\nXu expressed that while Huawei's accelerators may not be as advanced as Nvidia's, the supply of Huawei's chips is more reliable for both the Chinese government and domestic industry. Huawei is actively pushing for full self-sufficiency in terms of chips and the entire semiconductor value chain. Although Huawei's current accelerators lag behind Nvidia or AMD on paper, newer designs enable training and inference for multi-trillion-parameter models with up to a million NPUs.\n\nHowever, Xu cautioned that Huawei is not yet a threat to Nvidia outside of China due to insufficient production capacity and a lack of plans for international market expansion. The company prioritizes supplying chips to domestic customers with urgent needs, while limiting sales to a few international customers who have no alternative options or prefer Huawei's products.\n\nTransitioning away from foreign chips has become easier for model developers due to changing software paradigms. DeepSeek, an AI lab, has been working with Huawei's Ascend accelerators for over a year and has released several software tools to facilitate the transition for other AI labs. While the hardware barrier once posed a significant challenge, the software ecosystem has drastically improved in recent years, making it easier for AI developers to adopt Huawei's accelerators.",
  "summary": "The chips may not be as advanced, but they won't get banned at a moment's notice, Eric Xu says",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 2,
    "also_reported_by": [
      {
        "outlet": "The Register Science",
        "title": "Huawei boss claims homegrown AI chip sales top Nvidia in China",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/30/huawei-boss-claims-homegrown-ai-chip-sales-top-nvidia-in-china",
        "published": "2026-09-30T20:16:14.000Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}