Huawei Sees 2026 AI Chip Revenue Reaching $12 Billion as Ascend Takes Nvidia China Share
Continued U.S. restrictions on exports of Nvidia’s advanced AI chips to China have prompted Chinese cloud and model developers to accelerate adoption of domestic alternatives. Huawei’s Ascend series has consequently become a key source of chips for major AI companies including DeepSeek, Alibaba and Tencent, directly affecting Nvidia’s orders and market share in China.
Huawei expects AI chip revenue to reach $12 billion in 2026, up 60% from 2025. Growth will be driven mainly by the Ascend 950PR processor, which entered mass production in March 2026. As U.S. export controls constrain Nvidia’s ability to supply the Chinese market, Huawei is capturing more of the country’s demand for AI computing.
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The history behind this eventHuawei Moves Ascend 960DT Launch to Q1 2027 in Nvidia Challenge
Demand for computing power to train and run generative AI models has intensified competition in accelerators and high-speed interconnects, a market dominated by Nvidia. Huawei Technologies is building its Ascend lineup into a broader platform spanning chips, computing architecture and large clusters, seeking to narrow the gap with Nvidia while strengthening China’s domestic AI infrastructure amid U.S. restrictions on access to advanced semiconductors.
Huawei said at its Connect conference that it had brought forward the launch of its next-generation Ascend 960DT AI chip to the first quarter of 2027. The processor will power systems based on the new Peerium computing architecture, including the Atlas 950 supercluster. Huawei said the cluster could connect as many as 256,000 accelerator cards, targeting the extensive computing requirements of large-scale AI training and inference workloads.
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