But inside the country, the company is obsessed over catching up to DeepSeek on its development of AI models, and catching up to Huawei on the chips that power them, News.az reports, citing Reuters.
***
When Alibaba’s chip design unit T-Head unveiled its latest AI chip, the Zhenwu M890, last week, it also outlined a multi-year chip roadmap showing how the M890’s future successors would deliver massive performance gains in the next few years. Less than a year ago, Huawei had laid out a similar timeline that ran until 2028.
Unlike Huawei, Alibaba has not been targeted by U.S. sanctions, nor has it made its AI chip push as explicitly about beating Nvidia as the Shenzhen-based conglomerate has. But its decision to chase Huawei highlights the huge business opportunity presented by Beijing’s push to replace Nvidia.
IDC data reviewed by Reuters last month point to a Chinese AI chip market benefiting from Nvidia’s retreat, but where Huawei’s dominance is far from secure. Nvidia shipped 2.2 million AI accelerators to China in 2025, a 55% market share that rebuts Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s talking point that this figure was zero after U.S. export controls wiped out a near-monopoly held by the California-based chipmaker.
Whatever the real size of the void left by Nvidia, Alibaba and other domestic companies are not ready to hand it over to Huawei. Of the 1.65 million chips shipped by Chinese vendors in 2025, 812,000 came from Huawei, while Alibaba claimed second place, shipping around 265,000. Several other tech giants and startups are eyeing Huawei’s half of the pie.
As China nudges its AI industry to a post-Nvidia era, Huawei will face more competition. Besides Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent have the resources to mount a serious challenge. DeepSeek’s unquestionable lead among Chinese AI models lasted less than a year. Huawei might only have a few more.
In this week’s issue, we look at how Chinese chipmakers are trying to displace Nvidia from their country while searching for alternative chipmaking processes and theories to neutralise U.S. sanctions.
