The figures come from IDC data seen by Reuters and cover January to June 2026. Huawei shipped 572,000 accelerators, up from just over 300,000 a year earlier, leaving it six points behind Nvidia. Nine of the 11 Chinese chipmakers IDC tracks grew shipments year over year. Nvidia had not commented on the numbers as of the latest reports. Two forces are behind the shift. US export restrictions have limited what Nvidia can supply, and Beijing now requires approval before companies import certain compliant Nvidia chips while encouraging domestic alternatives. Jensen Huang has said the export controls handed a large part of China's roughly $50B AI chip market to rivals such as Huawei. For AI builders, the practical effect is a more split hardware world. Chinese model labs and cloud providers are building on a growing mix of domestic accelerators, which affects which software stacks their open-weight models are optimized for. Teams that depend on those models or sell into China should watch how fast that mix changes.