Huawei is expected to take the largest share of China’s AI chip market this year, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Wednesday.

Chinese technology companies are placing large orders for Huawei’s latest Ascend 950PR processor, the report said. Based on orders already secured, Huawei expects AI chip revenue to reach about $12 billion this year. That would be an increase of more than 60 percent from $7.5 billion in 2025.

Nvidia has struggled to re-enter the China market, blocked by regulations on both sides. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (젠슨 황) received U.S. government approval in March to sell H200 chips to China, but no shipments have been made so far due to local regulatory issues, FT reported, citing 2 sources familiar with the matter.

China is reported to be directing local technology companies to support domestic suppliers and use Nvidia chips only for overseas business. U.S. regulators, meanwhile, are requiring that Nvidia chips ordered by Chinese companies be used only within China.

Huawei’s latest chips are still assessed to lag Nvidia’s highest-performance products by more than 2 generations.

With that in mind, Huawei appears to be focusing on the inference market rather than taking on Nvidia head-on. Huawei sees inference driving demand for AI computing as applications such as AI agents spread. It is also seeking to offset weaker performance of individual chips by linking many AI chips with its own networking technology to build a powerful computing cluster, FT reported.