By Tobias Mann
Publication Date: 2026-09-30 20:16:00
systems
The chips may not be as advanced, but they won’t get banned at a moment’s notice, Eric Xu says
The Trump administration’s export control policies governing the sale of AI accelerators to China haven’t stopped homegrown Huawei from filling the void. In a Q&A-style release this week, the company’s rotating chairman Eric Xu claimed that its Ascend line of neural processing units (NPUs) had exceeded Nvidia in Chinese market share.
“It’s pretty hard to collect data about the market share of Nvidia in China, but based on the data we have collected, Ascend has surpassed Nvidia,” he said. “Chinese people have a keen sense of urgency, and will not accept a future in which others decide whether or not we can have access to certain products.”
Since taking office, the Trump administration has done an about-face on export controls. After imposing new licensing requirements on Nvidia’s and AMD’s China-spec accelerators in April 2025, the US Commerce Department reversed course that summer, later reaching an arrangement to cut the US government in on a percentage of certain China-bound chip sales. By late last year, the Trump administration loosened restrictions further, announcing that Nvidia would be allowed to sell its more potent H200-series parts to approved Chinese customers for the first…
