The China Information Technology Security Evaluation Centre and the National Secrecy Science and Technology Evaluation Centre released a new batch of “secure and reliable” certifications on Tuesday evening, and for the first time the list included a category for AI training and inference chips. Nine domestic processors passed Level I certification, including parts from Huawei’s Ascend line. The clearances are valid for three years.
The mechanic to understand here is not the certificate itself, it is what the certificate unlocks. China’s Information Technology Application Innovation procurement policy, usually rendered in English as the “innovation list,” is the document that tells government agencies and state-owned enterprises which hardware they are allowed to buy. Past expansions of the list pushed Chinese x86-replacement CPUs and homegrown operating systems into the procurement pipeline at the expense of Intel, AMD, and Microsoft. This expansion does the same thing for AI accelerators. State entities now have an approved domestic shopping list for AI silicon. Nvidia is not on it.
The revenue implication is large and already in motion. Huawei has guided to roughly $12 billion in AI chip revenue for 2026, up from $7.5 billion the prior year, on orders from Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent. Combined with the procurement list expansion, the company now has both private-sector and state-sector demand pulling in the same direction. The export-control regime the United States built to slow Chinese AI compute is still in place; it is just that the policy has functioned as a forcing function for domestic semiconductor capacity in exactly the way every dissenting policy paper predicted in 2023.
The clean read: China spent two years being the country that could not buy the best AI chips, and is now becoming the country that designs around them. The competitive dynamic in 2027 and beyond looks less like “Nvidia versus AMD with China as a side market” and more like “two parallel AI compute stacks, partially intercompatible, with the political delta determining which large customers can use which.” Worth thinking about the next time someone tells you the AI race is a two-horse race.