A common claim is that the United States cut China off from AI chips, and that Nvidia still holds 90% of the market. The fact is that the rules narrowed the top of the range, and 90% is an old China share. IDC put Nvidia at about 55% of AI accelerator cards shipped in China in 2025, about 2.2 million of 4 million cards. Chinese vendors shipped 41%, or 1.65 million cards. Huawei alone shipped about 812,000 Ascend chips. Jensen Huang has said Nvidia once held about 95% of China’s advanced accelerator market. That is the 90% line. It is not the 2025 count.

Sales and cards are different stocks. Nvidia’s filing for the year ending January 2026 put China including Hong Kong at $19.68 billion, about 9% of sales. A card shipped in China can be a compliant H20, not a flagship H100. In April 2025 the H20 itself was restricted. Nvidia took a $4.5 billion inventory charge. Licenses later resumed. In January 2026 the Bureau of Industry and Security moved H200 exports to China from a presumption of denial to case-by-case review, capped at half of US sales, with testing and customer checks. A cap is not a cutoff. A Bernstein forecast that Nvidia’s China share could fall to about 8% in 2026, with Huawei near half, is a projection. It is not a shipment count.

The compute gap is the part that holds. Epoch AI estimates Huawei made about 800,000 Ascend chips in 2025, against 4.5 million Nvidia chips, and that Huawei’s 2026 compute will be under 4% of Nvidia’s even if units rise to about 1.5 million. The Ascend 950 is about half an H100, a 2022 part. A teardown found the Ascend 910C used TSMC logic dies and Korean high-bandwidth memory. A China sales lead on compliant cards is not a lead in the factory. The war is a license regime and a performance gap, not a closed border and a 90% monopoly.

IDC counts accelerator cards shipped in China. A compliant card and a flagship card both count as one. Nvidia’s 9% is revenue booked in China including Hong Kong, divided by company sales. Epoch AI converts chips into H100-equivalents so a weaker chip does not equal a stronger one. A unit share and a compute share answer different questions.

Export rules are license tests, not a counted border. The January 2026 H200 rule is a cap at half of US sales, with review. Smuggled chips and stockpiled foreign dies are outside the official card series. A teardown of one Ascend part is not a census of every die.

It is settled that Nvidia shipped about 55% of China’s accelerator cards in 2025, that China was about 9% of Nvidia sales, and that Huawei’s estimated compute is under 4% of Nvidia’s. It is not settled that China was cut off, or that Nvidia holds 90%. Use 55% for the China card share. Use 9% for the sales share. Use under 4% for the compute gap. Do not use 90% as the current market.