Huawei declares victory over Nvidia in China on evidence it will not show
Eric Xu says Huawei's own data puts Ascend ahead of Nvidia in China; the claim ships with no share figure, no period and no basis. Nvidia assumes zero China data-center revenue in its guidance, and Beijing's industry ministry is telling buyers approval may come.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
The claim, published without its numbers
At Huawei Connect in Shanghai on September 17, rotating chairman Eric Xu said: "It's pretty hard to collect data about the market share of Nvidia in China, but based on the data we have collected, Ascend has surpassed Nvidia" 1. Huawei posted the Q&A on September 29 with no data behind the estimate 3.
The claim resurfaced as fresh news today: write-ups of the session ran on October 7 34. The record carries no share figure, no tabulation period, and no answer to whether the ranking counts revenue or units 3. A share claim with no share in it is a position, not a data point.
The fine print reads as scarcity
What Huawei volunteered beside the claim undercuts it as dominance: it cannot meet Chinese demand, has no plan for full overseas expansion, and prioritizes Chinese customers 2. The inference-oriented 950PR ships in limited volume; the training-oriented 950DT SuperPoD is still in testing, with volume supply only from late 2026 into early 2027 4. TrendForce still expects domestic chips near 90% of China's high-end AI chip market this year, in a market US export controls have largely cleared of Nvidia accelerators and where Huawei sells everything it can make 47.
The ruling the claim lands beside
MIIT has asked ByteDance, Alibaba and others to file purchase plans for Nvidia's RTX PRO 5500, and some were told approval is anticipated 5. That extends July's opening, when officials told Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek they might soon buy limited H200s, fewer than 200,000 in all and under half of what the firms requested 6.
A US-China summit agreed $30 billion in tariff exemptions without touching AI chips 7; Nvidia says US export rules and China's own import limits both still bind 5. The survey alone, unconfirmed by any wire account, moved the tape 57.
China's chip names fell 3.4–6.3% on a survey, before any approval
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Moore Threads | -6.3% |
| Cambricon | -5.7% |
| Hua Hong | -5% |
| CXMT | -4% |
| SMIC | -3.7% |
| NAURA | -3.4% |
Nvidia has already priced China at zero
The August 26 outlook guides $108.0 billion of third-quarter revenue, plus or minus 2%, and assumes no data-center compute revenue from China, on an $89.0 billion data-center quarter 8.
The China business is already a sliver: H200 shipments to the region ran below 1% of data-center revenue 1, and Jensen Huang said in October 2025 its share had "effectively fallen to zero" 6. Passing a rival locked outside the door is the cheapest victory on offer. MIIT's ruling decides whether the door opens: approval would be upside the forecast never counted, and a returning rival for the names that just fell.
The demand does not wait for Nvidia
DeepSeek's round, re-reported on October 6, has signed at least 80 billion yuan (about $12 billion) against a 50 billion yuan target, with term sheets pointing toward 100 billion, at a valuation of at least 500 billion yuan (about $75 billion); Tencent and CATL are among the top backers 9. Part of the money funds an Inner Mongolia data center built around at least 160,000 top-end Huawei accelerators, ahead of an early-2027 IPO 9.
¥80B signed against a ¥50B target
- Estimate
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Original target | ¥50B |
| Minimum signed | ¥80B |
| Possible final (estimate) | ¥100B |
The software leg moves with the money. On September 30 DeepSeek open-sourced compute and communication libraries for Ascend, built with Huawei, and detailed a jointly optimized supernode of 128 Ascend 950 chips 10.
The verdict watch
Three dated markers decide it: MIIT's approval call, the close of DeepSeek's round, and 950DT volume supply from late 2026 into early 2027 49. Approve, and the names that fell on a survey reprice against a rival they have not faced since the controls; withhold, and Huawei's claim stays what it is today, safe because it cannot be checked, useful because it cannot be.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
