Chinese Chipmakers Just Seized 41% of Their Own AI Market. Nvidia Lost 40 Points of Market Share in Two Years.
IDC data shows Nvidia dropped from 95% to 55% share in China. Sanctions were supposed to cripple Chinese AI. They built their own chips instead.
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The US bet that export controls would keep China dependent on American AI chips. New data from IDC, reported by Reuters, shows that bet is losing. Badly.
Chinese chipmakers now control 41% of their domestic AI accelerator market. Two years ago, Nvidia held an estimated 95% share. Today it is down to 55%. That is a 40-point collapse in the most strategically important chip market on Earth.
The numbers come from IDC's latest report: total shipments of AI accelerator cards in China hit approximately 4 million units in 2025. Nvidia shipped around 2.2 million. Chinese vendors shipped the rest. And the gap is closing fast.
Sanctions Backfired Exactly How Critics Predicted
The logic behind US export controls was straightforward: cut China off from the best AI chips, slow down their AI development, maintain American technological supremacy. The reality is that Washington created the single biggest incentive for China to build a domestic chip industry it might never have prioritized otherwise.
Chinese companies like Huawei (with its Ascend accelerators), Cambricon, and others are filling the gap. They are not matching Nvidia's top-end performance. They do not need to. They need to be good enough. And for the vast majority of AI training and inference workloads happening in Chinese data centers, they are.
The Government Push Makes It Permanent
This is not just market forces. Beijing is actively pushing data centers to use domestic chips. Government procurement rules, subsidies, and national security mandates are all accelerating the shift. Once Chinese AI infrastructure is built on Chinese chips, there is no going back. Even if sanctions were lifted tomorrow, the domestic ecosystem is now self-sustaining.
Nvidia still leads globally, and its H100 and Blackwell chips remain the gold standard for cutting-edge AI training. But China is the second-largest AI market in the world. Losing 40 points of share there is not a rounding error. It is a strategic defeat.
The lesson is one Washington keeps refusing to learn: you cannot sanction your way to technological dominance. You can only sanction your competitors into building alternatives. And that is exactly what happened.
First reported by Reuters, citing IDC data.