Nvidia will almost completely lose the AI segment in China in the coming years - analysts
Nvidia risks almost completely losing the Chinese AI market. According to Nikkei, citing Bernstein analysts, the company's share in this segment in China may decrease from the current 66% to 8% in the coming years. According to experts, up to 80% of demand can be covered by domestic solutions from Huawei, Cambricon, Moore Threads and other Chinese developers.
The key reason is export restrictions. The United States has banned the supply of advanced Nvidia GPUs to China, and Beijing, in response, has tightened the rules for purchasing foreign equipment for government agencies and companies working with government data. As a result, Chinese manufacturers have received a powerful incentive to accelerate the development of their own solutions.
Moore Threads CEO Zhang Jianzhong claims that the new GPU line, codenamed Huashan, "fully meets the requirements of local developers" and eliminates the need to wait for foreign solutions. In terms of class, these chips are comparable to Nvidia Hopper H100 and H200, which the United States allows to be supplied to China only with serious restrictions. At the same time, they are inferior only to the flagships Blackwell B200 and B300, which are completely prohibited for export.
Huawei is also actively increasing its presence in the segment: its Ascend accelerators and CloudMatrix platform are already competing with Nvidia solutions in a number of indicators. In the future, the company plans to build the Atlas 950 SuperCluster supercomputer with a peak performance of up to 4 zettaflops for artificial intelligence tasks.
Nevertheless, a complete rejection of Nvidia in the short term remains a difficult task. A significant part of Chinese data centers and cloud services are tied to the CUDA ecosystem, and switching to alternative platforms will require large investments and time. In addition, China is still facing production restrictions: SMIC factories are capable of mass production of only 7-nm chips, which hinders competition with Nvidia at the technological level.
Nevertheless, the desire for technological sovereignty is enshrined in China's five-year plan, so analysts agree that Nvidia's share in the Chinese market will decline from year to year.
