China struggles to shift tech firms away from Nvidia chips

China wants its tech giants to run on homegrown silicon. Its top AI developers keep reaching for Nvidia anyway. That tension sits at the center of Beijing’s push for semiconductor self-sufficiency. US export controls have made the effort urgent, and the gap between selling chips and changing habits is proving wider than policymakers might like. Huawei is winning on volume, not on habits Huawei, China’s leading domestic chip player, claims its Ascend AI chips have outsold Nvidia within China as of October 2026. For a company operating under heavy US restrictions, that is a notable milestone. Eric Xu, Huawei’s rotating chairman, has framed the company’s pitch around dependable domestic supply rather than raw peak performance. The argument is simple: a chip you can actually buy beats a faster one you might not be allowed to get. Many of China’s leading AI developers still rely on Nvidia hardware to train advanced large language models, the expensive, compute-hungry process of building an AI system from scratch. DeepSeek offers the clearest example. The company plans to deploy at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips for inference, while keeping Nvidia hardware for its training workl...