Huawei leads Chinese AI chip survey as budgets move local

Chinese companies are shifting AI chip procurement toward domestic suppliers faster than expected, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence survey. Over the next 12 months, the share of computing power budgets allocated to domestic chips is expected to rise from 30% to 46%. Huawei’s Ascend 910B/C chips reached a combined adoption and evaluation rate of 65%, ahead of Nvidia’s H20/L20 chips at 47% and older A800/H800 models at 47%.

The shift is being driven by Beijing’s localization goals and U.S. export controls that cut off Nvidia H20 supply to China. Local alternatives including Huawei, Hygon Information Technology and Cambricon are gaining priority, especially for inference and small-to-medium scale training. The main constraint is HBM supply: China’s domestic AI chip demand this year is about 4.2 million units, while supply is about 2.6 million units, leaving a gap of up to 1.6 million units.

CXMT is expanding memory production, but its usable HBM capacity for AI is only about 5,000 wafers per month, with HBM3 small-scale trial production expected by the end of 2026. At the same time, AI inference and agent workloads are lifting the data center CPU market, which multiple forecasts project will surpass $220 billion by 2030, drawing Nvidia, Qualcomm, MediaTek and Arm into a market long led by Intel and AMD.