Huawei Technologies took center stage at China’s largest artificial intelligence event of the year, the World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, underscoring its growing influence in the global chip race as Nvidia remained notably absent.
The move comes less than two weeks after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s high-profile visit to Beijing, sparking renewed hopes for the U.S. chipmaker’s return to the Chinese market.
Despite those hopes, Nvidia declined to participate in this year’s AI expo and offered no public explanation, even as it continues to face tight U.S. restrictions on advanced chip exports to China. The absence was jarring — especially given Nvidia’s towering presence in global AI development — and allowed Huawei to steal the spotlight with a bold showcase of its homegrown semiconductor muscle.
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At the entrance of the Shanghai Expo Center, Huawei unveiled the hardware behind its new computing powerhouse, the Atlas 900 A3 SuperPoD, linking 384 of its Ascend AI chips. The Chinese telecoms and tech conglomerate — already sanctioned and blacklisted by the U.S. — is positioning the new system as a domestic replacement for Nvidia’s cutting-edge GPUs, which have been largely barred from Chinese shores under Washington’s export controls.
Earlier in the year, analysts at SemiAnalysis suggested that although a single Ascend chip lacks the brute force of Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs, Huawei compensates by packing significantly more chips into its servers, potentially delivering similar performance at the cost of higher power consumption.
Huang himself had acknowledged Huawei as “one of the most formidable technology companies in the world,” warning that Beijing could swiftly turn to Huawei if the U.S. keeps Nvidia on a tight leash.
China’s Growing Self-Reliance in AI Chips
Huawei was not alone. A wide array of Chinese chip developers — including Moore Threads and Yunsilicon — maintained booths at WAIC, joining tech titans like Alibaba and Tencent in showcasing AI hardware and applications ranging from translation apps and smart glasses to autonomous robots and learning aids.
At the event, education-focused NetEase’s Youdao introduced a handheld bar-shaped device that uses AI to help students prepare for university entrance exams. The device is powered by both cloud-based AI and on-device “edge AI,” highlighting how China’s chipmakers are ramping up to deliver power-efficient processors that support real-time applications.
Gao Huituan, product manager for the hardware, emphasized that many domestic chipmakers are now able to deliver “very excellent” edge processors, reducing reliance on foreign GPUs.
“Now everyone has relatively good computing power,” he said, noting a shift in the tech balance.
This expanding local capability feeds directly into Beijing’s broader goal of tech self-sufficiency. Over the weekend, Chinese Premier Li Qiang announced the launch of a global AI cooperation body with headquarters likely based in Shanghai — a strategic move aimed at asserting China’s AI standards internationally.
Nvidia’s Shrinking Chinese Footprint
Nvidia’s absence from WAIC comes despite the company’s continued attempts to navigate U.S. export restrictions. It recently received permission from Washington to resume sales of its downgraded H20 AI chips to China — chips that were specifically designed to meet U.S. export criteria while still serving Chinese demand.
While Nvidia had a booth earlier this month at a Beijing supply chain conference during Huang’s visit, it has yet to announce when H20 shipments to China will resume or how many orders it has received.
Morningstar analyst Phelix Lee noted that despite current limitations, Nvidia is still the “de facto standard” for AI data center systems globally, citing not just the H20, but flagship models like the upcoming GB300 GPU.
“The return of H20 could help Nvidia to remain as the model in (AI) GPU development in the short to medium term,” he said in a statement.
But with the WAIC snub and Huawei’s rapid momentum, the dynamics appear to be changing. Nvidia’s grip on the Chinese AI market — once seen as indispensable — is clearly under threat. The $50 billion China AI chip market, which Huang is eager to tap into, now finds itself at the center of a fast-intensifying chip war between Washington and Beijing.
Trump’s AI Action Plan
The geopolitical undercurrents deepened over the weekend with U.S. President Donald Trump announcing a national AI strategy, which includes proposals to combat what he calls “woke” bias in AI models and boost the international presence of American tech.
In response, China’s announcement of a global AI cooperation organization — potentially rivaling U.S.-led AI regulatory frameworks — shows how the race for dominance is shifting from hardware and chips to rule-setting and global governance.
With Huawei leading the charge and Nvidia’s access to the market uncertain, the world’s AI battlefield is no longer confined to lab breakthroughs — it’s increasingly being defined by geopolitical lines, export bans, and rival standards that could reshape how technology develops over the next decade.