Huawei's chairman says the company's Ascend line of AI processors has moved ahead of Nvidia in the Chinese market, with locally sourced supply now underpinning the substitution of foreign AI chips.

The claim positions Huawei as the leading supplier of AI accelerators in China, the market Nvidia dominated before U.S. export controls restricted sales of its high-end data center GPUs to Chinese customers.

According to the chairman, domestic supply is the key factor behind the shift. Chinese fabs, packaging and component suppliers now form a supply chain capable of sustaining large-volume AI chip production without reliance on restricted U.S. technology, he indicated.

Nvidia has not publicly responded to the claim at the time of writing. The U.S. chipmaker has seen its China revenue shrink since Washington tightened export controls, and it now sells only compliance-approved, performance-reduced products into the country.

For Chinese cloud providers and AI developers, the reported shift to Ascend carries practical consequences. Huawei's ecosystem, including its CANN software stack and Atlas server hardware, differs from Nvidia's CUDA platform, so migration requires engineering effort. Still, ongoing substitution suggests that availability and policy pressure are outweighing software-stack inertia for many buyers.

The statement from Huawei's chairman is a market signal rather than an audited market-share figure. Independent verification of the exact split between Ascend and Nvidia shipments in China remains unavailable. But the direction is consistent with previous reporting: Nvidia's share of the Chinese AI accelerator market has declined since export controls took effect, while Huawei has scaled Ascend production.

Industry observers will watch several indicators to confirm the claim: reported shipment volumes of Ascend 910B and successor parts, order patterns at major Chinese cloud operators, and any Nvidia disclosures on China revenue in upcoming quarterly reports.