Huawei's rotating chairman Eric Xu has claimed that the company's Ascend neural processing units have surpassed Nvidia in market share within China, capitalising on US export controls that have restricted American chip sales to the region. The Trump administration's initial blockade of Nvidia and AMD accelerators, though later partially relaxed, prompted the Chinese government to pressure domestic data centre operators to transition to homegrown alternatives, creating a strategic opening for Huawei despite acknowledging its chips are less technologically advanced.

Whilst Huawei's accelerators fall short of Nvidia's specifications, the company compensates through scale and supply certainty. Nvidia's H200 accelerator shipments to China currently represent less than 1 per cent of the company's datacenter revenues, whilst Huawei is deploying a 256,000-card Atlas 950 SuperCluster with plans to scale to one million NPUs. Huawei stated it lacks international capacity and will prioritise Chinese customers over overseas markets, with evolving software ecosystems removing barriers that previously favoured Nvidia's CUDA platform.