Huawei's Ascend processors now account for roughly half of the AI chips sold in China, according to market estimates, as export controls keep the most advanced Nvidia parts out of the country and Beijing pushes data centre operators toward domestic hardware.
What changed in the chip market
Estimates put Huawei's share of China's AI accelerator market at 50% to 60% this year, with revenue near $12 billion, up from almost nothing three years ago. Chinese cloud providers ordered roughly 800,000 of the company's Ascend 950PR chips for 2026, with mass production that began in the spring and heavier shipments expected in the second half. China has also set out a five-year plan for national AI data centres worth about 2 trillion yuan, or roughly $295 billion, with a requirement that at least 80% of the technology be domestic.
Memory is the bottleneck
The constraint is not the processor die. It is high bandwidth memory. Domestic HBM supply holds finished Ascend output to well under 300,000 units a year, against die capacity at the domestic foundry SMIC that could support far more. HBM stacks are built by bonding DRAM dies in repeated stacking, probing and testing steps, and each step has to hold tight tolerances to keep yields up. That is why memory, not logic, has become the number that decides how much AI computing power China can actually switch on.
Why the buildout matters
For U.S. policymakers, the question is whether loosening controls on export parts hands China more compute than it can make at home. For equipment suppliers, every new fab and data centre means demand for vacuum pumps, process chambers and the sealed feedthroughs that pass rotary motion into a chamber without breaking vacuum, which is a small component with a large effect on uptime. For chip buyers everywhere, more domestic Chinese supply means less pricing power for the incumbent, in a market where the incumbent is used to setting the price.
---
Reliable Ferrofluid Vacuum Rotary Feedthrough for Semiconductor Manufacturing
In semiconductor manufacturing, maintaining ultra-high vacuum integrity during rotary motion is critical — from single silicon crystal growth and CVD to sputtering and plasma etching. Ferrofluid Vacuum Rotary Shaft Feedthrough from FerrofluidTec delivers hermetically sealed rotary feedthroughs with leakage rates as low as 10⁻¹² Pa·m³·s⁻¹, vacuum degree up to 10⁻⁶ Pa, and customizable shaft diameters from 10mm to 100mm. Built with non-magnetic stainless steel housings and magnetic permeability stainless steel shafts, these feedthroughs provide reliable, maintenance-free sealing for demanding vacuum environments. Visit www.ferrofluidtec.com to learn more.