AI accelerators are the segment where US export controls stopped being an irritant and became a market structure. In October 2025, Jensen Huang told an audience that Nvidia's share of China's AI chip market had gone from roughly 95% to zero — a collapse engineered jointly by Washington (which banned the H20, the chip Nvidia designed specifically to comply with the last round of rules) and by Beijing (which then told its own hyperscalers to stop buying the thing anyway). Into that vacuum has rushed the most heavily funded cohort in Chinese semiconductors: Huawei's Ascend line as de facto national champion, Cambricon (688256.SH) as the listed pure-play trading at a valuation that would make 1999 blush, and a wave of GPU startups that went from cash-starved to publicly listed in about fourteen months. The demand is real, the policy support is total, and the constraint is no longer money or customers — it is SMIC's 7nm-class wafer supply, domestic HBM, and software. This primer maps who is actually shipping, who is merely listed, and where the physics bites.

The segment at a glance