Huawei says its homegrown AI processors are now outselling Nvidia's chips in China, according to remarks attributed to the company's leadership and reported by The Register.

The claim marks the sharpest public assertion yet by Huawei that its Ascend line of AI accelerators has overtaken Nvidia inside the world's second-largest AI market. Nvidia has spent the past two years squeezed by successive US export controls that bar it from selling its top data-center GPUs — including the A100, H100 and the China-specific A800 and H800 derivatives — to Chinese customers.

Huawei has positioned its Ascend product family as the primary domestic alternative. The claim of outselling Nvidia in China, if accurate, would represent a milestone for the Chinese semiconductor effort: a homegrown accelerator line capturing the largest share of a market that Nvidia once dominated outright.

No specific unit volumes, revenue figures or process-node details accompanied the claim as reported. Huawei has previously built its Ascend accelerators on domestic and SMIC-fabricated silicon, a supply chain constrained by US restrictions on advanced lithography equipment.

Nvidia's position in China has deteriorated step by step since 2022. Washington first restricted the A100 and H100, then closed the workaround chips Nvidia designed for the Chinese market, and later tightened rules again. The result: Nvidia's China data-center revenue, once a substantial share of its business, has fallen to a small fraction of total sales, and Chinese cloud providers have shifted orders toward domestic suppliers, Huawei chief among them.

Huawei's assertion carries commercial weight beyond bragging rights. A domestic champion outselling Nvidia in China would signal that export controls have effectively handed a major market segment to a Chinese competitor — the opposite of the controls' stated intent of freezing Beijing's AI compute capabilities.

Caveats apply. The claim comes from Huawei itself rather than independent shipment data, and Huawei has an obvious interest in talking up its silicon. Nvidia does not break out China AI accelerator shipments with enough granularity to verify the comparison directly. Third-party estimates of Ascend production have varied widely, constrained by limited visibility into SMIC's advanced-node capacity.

How the competitive picture develops will depend on whether Huawei can scale Ascend production to meet demand at Nvidia-class volumes — and on whether Washington's next round of restrictions tightens or loosens the supply of advanced compute into China.