NVIDIA falls while Cambricon thrives

In the past two years, NVIDIA, the absolute leader in the global AI chip field, has been struggling under the tightening export control red lines in the United States. In order to find even a little space within the rules, Jensen Huang has made many efforts. On October 6, 2025, at the Citadel Securities Global Market Future Conference held at Casa Cipriani in New York, NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang mentioned a number when discussing the Chinese market. He said that due to U.S. export controls, NVIDIA's market share in China's AI chips, which are the core hardware used to drive large models for thinking and computation, has dropped from 95% to 0%. Before Jensen Huang revealed that NVIDIA's market share had "returned to zero," the Chinese AI chip market could once be equated with NVIDIA. "It was difficult to obtain," was the norm, and stories of price increases, long queues, and leveraging various connections to find sources were widely circulated in the industry at that time. Eleven days after Jensen Huang's statement, on the evening of October 17, Cambricon disclosed its financial report for the third quarter of 2025: the company achieved operating revenue of 1.727 billion yuan in the third quarter of 2025, a staggering increase of 1332.52% compared to the same period last year; the net profit attributable to shareholders of the listed company was 567 million yuan, while the same period last year saw a loss of 194 million yuan. Between these two figures lies a huge market space: a former player that once held a 95% share and a local company with a quarterly revenue growth of over 13 times. After NVIDIA's high-end chips were restricted, Huawei's Ascend series chips quickly became a strong alternative in the market, thanks to their advantages in software and hardware collaboration. NVIDIA's old rival AMD is also not absent; the company is actively seeking opportunities in the Chinese market with its MI300 series AI chips. NVIDIA's absence has led the market landscape, once dominated by a single company, into a new stage of competition among many players