Huawei and HiSilicon

Market share

Huawei Shipped 572,000 AI Accelerators in China in the First Half of 2026

That is 28% of China's data center accelerators by units, against NVIDIA's 34%, and the gap is closing from both ends.

IDC tracked 11 Chinese suppliers, and nine of them shipped more than a year earlier. The vendors IDC names add to 47% of units, against 41% for Chinese chips across 2025. NVIDIA's units fell because US licensing limits what it can sell in China, not because demand fell: Reuters reported in January 2026 that Chinese orders for the H200 passed two million.

Huawei sells systems as well as chips. The Atlas 900 A3 SuperPoD (CloudMatrix 384) links 384 Ascend 910C chips and is sold to Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, ByteDance and DeepSeek, among others. Huawei makes up for a weaker chip with more of them per system, and pays for it in power: the 384-chip system is reported to draw about 560 kW.

Supply chain

Every Ascend Link Is in China or Comes From Stock Bought Before the Controls

• Made in US
• Some US volume
• US planned
• Made abroad
• Not disclosed

None of the seven links is made in the US, and Huawei has no US route to add. The full record, with sources for each row, is on the Ascend 910C supplier ring. The same dataset shows the opposite pattern for the other nine chips tracked: TSMC appears in all nine, and the supplier rings hub compares all 10.

Foundry

SMIC N+3 and Hybrid Bonding Stand In for EUV

SMIC makes every current Huawei chip. Its N+2 process (7nm class) uses deep ultraviolet (DUV) scanners with multiple patterning, and N+3 pushes the same tools further; TechInsights confirmed N+3 in the Kirin 9030 in December 2025 and found it denser than N+2 but well short of commercial 5nm nodes. With no EUV, each step costs more exposures and yield. The Kirin 9050 Pro takes another route: two dies, one on each node, joined copper to copper so that each major block spans both. Huawei says LogicFolding uses more than 50 million hybrid bonds and raised transistor density by 53.5%. China still imports most hybrid bonding equipment; Piotech, the leading domestic maker, reported 136 million yuan of bonding tool revenue in 2025.

SMIC itself is running full. Second-quarter 2026 revenue was $3.006 billion, its first quarter above $3 billion, with 93.7% utilization and 90.2% of revenue from China. See Process Nodes and Hybrid Bonding.

Memory

HBM, Not Logic Wafers, Caps Ascend Output

HBM caps Ascend output more than logic wafers do. SMIC has wafer capacity for more than a million Ascend dies a year, but every package needs memory stacks, and China's own HBM is early: SemiAnalysis put CXMT's overall yield on eight-layer HBM3 at about 25% in June 2026, and lower for 12-layer parts. CXMT's scale is not the limit. It listed on Shanghai's STAR Market in July 2026 and reported first-half revenue of 150.3 billion yuan, up 874%, on commodity DRAM prices. See HBM.

Roadmap

Huawei Answers the Per-Chip Gap With Chip Count

Bloomberg reported in September 2025 that Huawei planned about 600,000 Ascend 910C chips for 2026, double 2025, and up to 1.6 million dies across the line, with yields still low. A March 2026 report put the 950PR plan at about 750,000 units for the year; neither figure is confirmed by Huawei. The roadmap answers the per-chip gap with scale: superpods of thousands of chips, Huawei's own memory and its CANN software stack, which Huawei said in 2025 it would open-source along with the MindSpore framework.

Controls

Cut Off From TSMC Since 2020

Each round of US controls has pushed Huawei further into a domestic chain, and Beijing's buying rules have handed that chain demand. The broader picture across foundry, memory, tools and materials is on China Bifurcation.

Related coverage

Related Coverage

• China Bifurcation
• NVIDIA
• AI Accelerators
• HBM
• Hybrid Bonding
• Chip Supplier Rings