Huawei expects its AI chip revenue to climb 60% to roughly $12 billion in 2026, as Chinese tech giants flood the company with orders for its latest Ascend processors and US export restrictions push domestic demand toward homegrown alternatives.
The Financial Times reported the projection, citing orders Huawei received following the release of DeepSeek V4 — a large language model optimized for Huawei’s Ascend hardware that accelerated a shift already underway in China’s AI infrastructure market. The figure is a projection based on current order volume, not confirmed revenue.
ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have all placed large-scale orders for the Ascend 950PR, Huawei’s flagship AI processor. ByteDance alone committed more than $5.6 billion in Ascend purchases this year — up from near zero previously — effectively co-financing a significant portion of Huawei’s production ramp. The 950PR entered mass production in March and captured the majority of Huawei’s orders for the year. An upgraded Ascend 950DT is planned for the fourth quarter.
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Nvidia‘s position in China is less a retreat than a forced exit. The H100 is banned outright under US export controls. The H20 — a restricted variant Washington had permitted for Chinese sale — faces mounting restrictions of its own, and ongoing US-China disagreements over sales conditions have stalled deployments, handing Huawei a widening opening in the world’s largest AI market.
DeepSeek V4 catalyzed the demand spike. Built on a Mixture-of-Experts architecture with up to 1 trillion parameters, the model was delayed for months as DeepSeek rewrote its underlying architecture to run on Huawei and Cambricon chips. When it launched, Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud deployed it the same day, driving an immediate surge in demand for AI compute — and for the processors behind it.
Huawei is targeting production of approximately 750,000 Ascend 950PR units in 2026, with full-scale shipments expected in the second half of the year, but output is likely to fall short of demand. US restrictions on advanced chipmaking equipment continue to constrain SMIC, the Chinese foundry producing the 950PR on a 7nm process. Chip prices have already risen roughly 20% as demand outpaces supply.
China’s core AI industry exceeded 1.2 trillion yuan in 2025, spanning more than 6,200 enterprises, with next-generation AI agent penetration expected to surpass 90% by 2030. Huawei’s revenue push formalizes what the US export policy has already set in motion: a global AI chip market splitting into two distinct ecosystems, one built on Nvidia silicon, the other on Ascend.
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