Nvidia Once Dominated China with 90% Market Share, Now It's Zero: Here's Why
KOMPAS.com - The CEO of chip-making giant Nvidia, Jensen Huang, has disclosed a surprising and ironic fact regarding the fate of his company’s business in China.
The man synonymous with his black leather jacket revealed that Nvidia’s market share in the Bamboo Curtain country has now plummeted to zero.
Previously, Nvidia had strongly dominated the semiconductor and artificial intelligence (AI) chip market in China.
This statement was made directly by Huang in an interview session on the Memos to the President programme organised by the Special Competitive Studies Project at the end of April.
“Nvidia previously had, let’s say, around 90% market share there,” Huang stated in the interview. “But today, in China, our market share has now dropped to zero.”
Interestingly, the collapse of Nvidia’s business dominance in China has become an irony in itself.
Strict export control rules designed by the United States (US) government were initially aimed at protecting their dominant position and technological superiority.
However, this policy has instead become a boomerang that has directly caused Nvidia to lose its market share in China.
Nvidia’s inability to sell its flagship chips has created a gap that has been quickly exploited by local Chinese chip manufacturers to capture the market.
On the same occasion, Huang specifically mentioned the architecture of his latest generation AI GPU, namely Blackwell and Rubin. He firmly stated that China must not have access to these two lines of super-advanced chips at all.
According to Huang, in the current global artificial intelligence race, the US must absolutely maintain full control.
He confidently asserted that the United States must have “the first, the most, and the best” in terms of ownership of AI hardware.
He called for US semiconductor players to continue being given leeway and allowed to compete competitively, including continuing to do business in the Chinese market to sell product lines that do not violate export rules.
The current market share condition that has now plummeted to “zero percent” is quite the opposite of Nvidia’s situation a few months ago.
In March, Huang had boasted that Nvidia had secured chip orders from “many customers” from China, following official export approval to distribute the H200 AI chip series.
The H200 itself is an Nvidia AI chip whose capabilities have been specifically reduced to pass US regulations.
However, geopolitical dynamics, the tight US export sanctions that have backfired, and the aggressive manoeuvres of local Chinese chip manufacturers have drastically changed the competitive landscape in a short time, as compiled by KompasTekno from Tom’s Hardware.