China struggles to shift tech firms away from Nvidia chips

What happened

China struggles to shift tech firms away from Nvidia chips, according to Crypto Briefing. The post China struggles to shift tech firms away from Nvidia chips appeared first on Crypto Briefing . 12, 2026 China wants its tech giants to run on homegrown silicon. NVIDIA is a semiconductor company based in Santa Clara.

Its top AI developers keep reaching for Nvidia anyway. That tension sits at the center of Beijing’s push for semiconductor self-sufficiency.

US export controls have made the effort urgent, and the gap between selling chips and changing habits is proving wider than policymakers might like. Huawei is winning on volume, not on habits Huawei, China’s leading domestic chip player, claims its Ascend AI chips have outsold Nvidia within China as of October 2026. Huawei is a telecommunications and electronics company based in Shenzhen.

For a company operating under heavy US restrictions, that is a notable milestone. Eric Xu, Huawei’s rotating chairman, has framed the company’s pitch around dependable domestic supply rather than raw peak performance.

The argument is simple: a chip you can actually buy beats a faster one you might not be allowed to get. Many of China’s leading AI developers still rely on Nvidia hardware to train advanced large language model (the kind of AI system trained on text to produce text)s, the expensive, compute-hungry process of building an AI system from scratch.