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Jensen Huang said it himself at the Citadel Securities event back in October: "At the moment, we are 100% out of China. We went from 95% market share to 0%." That's not bearish speculation, that's the CEO of the world's most valuable chip company publicly quantifying what happened after rolling waves of export bans since 2022.
And the IDC numbers from 2025 tell you exactly where that share went. Chinese domestic chipmakers now control 41% of the local AI server market, shipping 1.65 million AI GPUs out of roughly 4 million total units. Nvidia still technically leads at 55% with about 2.2 million cards, but that's a massive collapse from 95%. Huawei is the biggest domestic winner at roughly 812,000 chips shipped, about 20% of the whole market. Alibaba's T-Head came in second with 256,000 units, and Baidu's Kunlunxin and Cambricon each shipped around 116,000.
What's really caught my attention lately is the IPO wave that's building around this shift. Moore Threads listed on Shanghai's STAR Market on December 5 and closed up 425% on day one after raising $1.13 billion. That was the biggest first day pop for any IPO over $1 billion since China's 2019 STAR Market reforms. Then MetaX debuted on December 17 and did even better, closing up 693% after raising $596 million. MetaX was founded in 2020 by three former AMD engineers and its retail tranche was oversubscribed more than 4,000 times. Biren Technology became the first Chinese GPU company to list in Hong Kong on January 2, raising HK$5.58 billion at the top of its range. Institutional demand was 26x oversubscribed and the retail portion was 2,348x oversubscribed. Then on the same day, Baidu announced that its AI chip unit Kunlunxin had confidentially filed for a Hong Kong IPO. JPMorgan analysts have forecast Kunlunxin's chip sales to increase sixfold to 8 billion yuan by 2026.
On the hardware side, Huawei is executing a pretty aggressive roadmap. Bloomberg reported that Huawei plans to produce about 600,000 units of its Ascend 910C chip in 2026, roughly doubling this year's output. Including other Ascend models, total production could reach 1.6 million dies. The 910C delivers about 800 TFLOPS of FP16 performance, roughly 80% of an H100, and it's manufactured by SMIC on an enhanced 7nm process. Huawei also launched the Ascend 950PR in Q1 2026, which is the first chip to integrate Huawei's in house HBM memory at 128GB and 1.6 TB/s bandwidth. A training focused variant called the 950DT is expected in Q4 with 144GB memory and 4 TB/s bandwidth. Major customers reportedly include Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and DeepSeek, which plans to deploy its V4 model on the 950PR.
I've been looking at ways to get exposure to this shift without trying to pick individual Chinese chip startups, most of which are unprofitable and listed only in Shanghai or Hong Kong. One thing I noticed is that CNQQ has a pretty different composition compared to the usual China tech ETFs like KWEB or CQQQ. KWEB is basically all internet stocks with zero A share exposure. CNQQ allocates about 8.5% to semiconductors and 10.2% to telecom equipment, and its top holdings include names like Cambricon at 2.3%, ZTE at 1.1%, NAURA Technology at 1.3%, and Zhongji Innolight at 3.5%. It's roughly 50/50 between A shares and Hong Kong listed stocks with about 100 constituents. The underlying index returned 39.7% in 2025 in USD terms.
Worth noting, Chinese tech names have been catching a bid again recently. On April 16 the Nasdaq Golden Dragon China Index was up 1.74%, with NIO gaining 7%, Alibaba up over 4%, and Baidu and XPeng both up more than 3%. CNQQ closed at $23.48 that day, up 1.57%, with after hours pushing to $23.99 which would be +2.17%. For comparison, CQQQ closed at $49.10, up 1.93%. Both have bounced off their March lows but CQQQ is still well below its February highs near $55 while CNQQ has recovered closer to its earlier range. Not a pure semiconductor play by any means, but CNQQ is the closest thing I've found to a broad China tech basket that actually includes the hard tech and chip ecosystem names rather than just Tencent, Meituan, and PDD.
The question I keep coming back to is whether this domestic chip buildout is actually investable from outside China, or if it's mostly a story that benefits companies you can't easily access. Huawei is private. Moore Threads and MetaX are on STAR Market. Most of the supply chain is buried in A shares. Curious if anyone else has been tracking this and how you're thinking about positioning.