Huawei tops China's AI chip adoption for first time as 'de-Nvidia' push accelerates

Chinese companies are rapidly replacing AI chips with domestically made alternatives amid US semiconductor export restrictions. Huawei's AI accelerators now outpace Nvidia's China-specific products in adoption rates, a sign that the country's "de-Nvidia" shift is gaining serious momentum.

A Bloomberg Intelligence survey of 60 executives at Chinese software, financial, manufacturing and retail companies, released Tuesday, found that Huawei's Ascend 910B/C AI accelerator had the highest adoption rate among 12 products surveyed, at 65 percent including pilot deployments and evaluation-stage use.

That figure significantly outpaced Nvidia's China-tailored H20/L20 chips (47 percent) — products whose performance was scaled back to comply with US export controls — as well as the older A800/H800 generation (47 percent). It also exceeded AMD's MI308, which posted a 55 percent adoption rate.

Chinese chipmakers also showed strong gains across the board.

Hygon's DCU and Cambricon Technologies' MLU and Siyuan chips each recorded adoption and evaluation rates of 52 percent, both ahead of Nvidia's offerings. Baidu's Kunlun Core and Alibaba's T-Head chips reached 50 percent, while Moore Threads' MTT (48 percent) and MetaX's C-series (47 percent) matched or surpassed Nvidia's products.

Newer Chinese AI chip entrants also drew active consideration: Iluvatar CoreX and Tianshu (38 percent each), Enflame's CloudBlazer (38 percent), and Biren's BR100/BR104 (40 percent) all registered meaningful evaluation activity.

Chinese companies said they plan to allocate 46 percent of their AI accelerator budgets to domestic products over the next 12 months — a significant increase from the roughly 30 percent share that homegrown chips currently hold.

However, the cost of expanding AI investment is mounting. Some 80 percent of respondents said their infrastructure spending on AI projects had already exceeded initial budgets this year.

Bloomberg Intelligence said China's efforts to substitute domestic AI chips for foreign ones are "showing meaningful progress," adding that Huawei and Hygon are among the chipmakers most likely to benefit.

The report also identified Tencent, Alibaba and Huawei as the biggest potential beneficiaries of the broader localization trend in AI infrastructure.

Nvidia products remain in high demand in China, but their market share is expected to gradually erode. Chinese authorities have reportedly urged domestic tech companies to limit their use of H20 chips, making procurement increasingly difficult, while homegrown alternatives are quickly filling the gap.

The Chinese government has set a target of investing about 2 trillion yuan ($294 billion) in data center construction nationwide over the next five years, with a goal of having domestic companies supply more than 80 percent of key technologies, including semiconductors.

Bloomberg Intelligence cautioned, however, that the bottleneck in the AI chip race is shifting from computing performance to securing high-bandwidth memory (HBM).

The report said this shift means memory chipmaker CXMT (Changxin Memory Technologies) could stand to benefit more than foundry companies such as SMIC.