Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the company's market share of AI accelerators in China has now dropped to 0%. The drop is staggering, given that the company owned the lion's share of China's AI accelerator market just two years ago.
"In China, we have now dropped to zero," Huang said in an interview with the Special Competitive Studies Project, a bipartisan initiative by American lawmakers aimed at ensuring long-term competitiveness of the U.S. "Conceding an entire market the size of China probably does not make a lot of strategic sense, so I think that has already largely backfired. Maybe it made sense at the time, but I think the policy really needs to be dynamic and needs to stay with the times."
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Earlier this year, tech research firm Bernstein estimated that Nvidia’s share of China’s AI GPU market could fall from 66% in 2024 to roughly 8% in the coming years, both due to restrictions imposed by the U.S. government and because domestic vendors are moving to cover up to 80% of demand. According to Huang, this happened much later, though again, he talks only about Nvidia's direct sales to Chinese customers.
Indeed, Chinese developers are increasingly relying on local hardware, with companies like Huawei, Cambricon, Moore Threads, and MetaX advancing both silicon and software. In software — the so-called CUDA moat in particular — remains the main frontier of American AI technology in China that local companies have yet to conquer.
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