I run Chinese open models on a 4×3090 rig every day. The more I watched these models get tuned for domestic hardware, the more I wanted to know what that hardware actually is, so I mapped it. At least 7 Chinese companies are already shipping AI accelerators, and most of them IPO'd in the last 6 months.

China's own framing is "3 dragons, 4 snakes." The dragons are Big Tech that also builds full-stack GPUs. Huawei alone shipped 812K AI cards last year, 49% of China's domestic supply, with their own HBM and their own fabs. The Ascend 950 reportedly targets H200-class.

The "snakes" are the pure-plays that just IPO'd, and this is the part that surprised me: several were founded by the former chief GPU architects of NVIDIA and AMD. MetaX is basically AMD's old global GPU leadership rebuilt in Shenzhen, revenue up about 3,800x in three years. Alibaba is shipping a server with 16×96GB = 1.5TB of VRAM in one box, enough to hold a frontier model in BF16 fully on-prem.

Meanwhile production moved from TSMC to SMIC, and NVIDIA's China share fell from about 95% to 55% in two years. The metal and the open models are converging.

Full breakdown with all 7 vendors and sources:

https://x.com/superalesha/article/2069415447779246440

Three dragons, four snakes, and the silicon nobody outside China can name.

For the past few months, many peoples in my timeline has been arguing about the same thing: NVIDIA export controls, H20 quotas, and whether Jensen gets to sell to China at all.

Almost nobody is asking the question that actually matters. What is China going to run instead?

Here's the part the Western AI crowd has mostly missed. At least seven Chinese companies are already shipping AI accelerators today. Current-generation parts land around NVIDIA H100, and next-gen is targeting H200. Most of them IPO'd in the last six months. In many cases the people who designed them are the same engineers who designed the chips at NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel that they're now competing with.

I run open-weight Chinese models (Qwen, DeepSeek, GLM) on a 4×3090 rig in my apartment every day. So when the hardware those models are being tuned for starts moving this fast, I pay attention. This is the map I wish someone had drawn for me.

>Source note: most of the specifics below come from a talk by Dmitry Shilov, CTO of CHITEX and the accompanying deck. Where a claim is spicy or unverified, I flag it as his claim, not gospel. Specs, revenue, and IPO dates are from the deck. Treat performance comparisons as vendor or analyst figures, not independent benchmarks.

The Chinese frame for this market is wonderfully Chinese: "three dragons and four snakes." Three Big Tech giants that also make silicon, and four pure-play chip companies that just went public.

The three dragons: big tech silicon

These are companies worth $100B or more that also build full-stack GPUs: chips, servers, clusters, and the software to run them. In Chinese terms a "cluster" starts at 10,000 cards. At roughly 8 cards per server, do that math. All three have their own answers to NVLink and NVSwitch.

Huawei Ascend, number one in China

https://preview.redd.it/wx96coxpv39h1.png?width=3000&format=png&auto=webp&s=d059137749034def184e85b733f1d818406c8ec5

- Revenue (Huawei, 2024): ¥862B, about .
- Market position: number one Chinese AI-chip vendor at 812K cards, 49% of the 1.65M domestic supply and about 20% of the full ~4M-card market. 42% of national AI-accelerator supply.
- Ascend 910C: mass production in 2025 (~300K units), with a plan for 600K in 2026.
- Ascend 910D: 5nm, 4-die package, FP8 support, mass production Q2 to Q3 2026, positioned against the H100.
- Ascend 950PR and 950DT: next gen, rolling out across 2026, with Huawei's own HBM (HiZQ 2.0, 4 TB/s), so independence from SK Hynix.
- Target: 4 ZFLOPS of FP4 by 2028.

Huawei is the one vendor here whose hardware is deliberately not CUDA-compatible. They built their own stack with global expansion in mind. The one Ascend headline that does leak into Western media is that the 950PR reportedly beats the H200 outright, well past the H20. (That's the vendor and talk claim. I haven't seen independent numbers.)

Alibaba T-Head, number two, and the box that should scare you

https://preview.redd.it/t04dc64sv39h1.png?width=3000&format=png&auto=webp&s=3a208d64ed304b2eee1907387baa827eadaa3bce

- Revenue (Alibaba, FY2025): about .
- Market position: number two Chinese vendor at ~265K cards, 16% of domestic supply.
- PPU: 96GB HBM2e, 400W TDP, positioned against the H20.
- IPO: T-Head spin-off and listing process started January 2026.

The detail that stopped me is the Alibaba PG1 server. Sixteen PG1_810E cards at 96GB each is 1,536 GB of VRAM in a single box, with two Intel Xeon 8558P and 2TB of system RAM. That's enough to hold GLM 5.x in BF16: a private, on-prem, full-fat frontier-model box, your own Claude Code in a chassis, no cloud and no telemetry. Backed by Alibaba Cloud, the number one CSP in China.

Baidu Kunlunxin, number three, inference-first

https://preview.redd.it/h9i6h57vv39h1.png?width=3000&format=png&auto=webp&s=b55f9288ed36018a850edd6679d523a0ff7a4f61

- Revenue (Baidu, 2025): $18.5B, market cap about .
- Market position: number three at ~116K cards (7%), neck-and-neck with Cambricon.
- Kunlun M100: inference-optimized, already shipping (Q1 2026).
- Kunlun M300: training plus multimodal inference, 2027.
- Tianchi Super Nodes 256/512: up to 1 trillion parameters, available 2026.
- IPO: Baidu is weighing a Kunlunxin spin-off and listing (Dec 2026).

The four snakes: the pure-plays that just IPO'd

These companies went public on the Hong Kong and Shanghai STAR exchanges starting December 2025. Their previous gen is roughly A100, current gen roughly H100, all in OAM form factor (the open-standard analog of NVIDIA's SXM). One thread runs through all of them: they were founded by ex-NVIDIA and ex-AMD people, frequently the literal architects of the chips they're now cloning.

MetaX (曦云), the one that tells the whole story

https://preview.redd.it/nil52xeyv39h1.png?width=3000&format=png&auto=webp&s=0549af5456bbba013d60909daee68e83b9fb5a4c

- Revenue (2025): ¥1.64B (~$230M), up 121% year over year, net loss ¥830M.
- IPO: Shanghai STAR (688802.SS), Dec 17 2025, up 693% on day one, about ¥332B (~$47B) market cap at debut.
- C600: 144GB HBM3e, MXMACA architecture, positioned against the H200, mass production Q3 2026.
- C700: next gen, fully Chinese production from 2027.
- The number: revenue went from ¥426K in 2022 to ¥1.6B in 2025, roughly 3,800x in three years.

Now look at who built it. The founding team:

- Chen Weiliang (CEO): 22+ years in GPU design, global chief GPU architect and global chief SoC architect at AMD.
- Peng Li (Hardware): 19+ years, first female engineer at AMD China.
- Yang Jian (Software): 24+ years, first research fellow at AMD China.

https://preview.redd.it/f3sttt21w39h1.png?width=3000&format=png&auto=webp&s=f64c4e20c26fe747c84a95b122e9d62b6d805332

Moore Threads, gaming and AI

- Revenue (2025): ¥1.505B (~$219M), up 243% year over year, net loss narrowing.
- IPO: Shanghai STAR (688795.SS), Dec 5 2025, up 400% on day one, raised about .
- MTT S5000: flagship, 80GB, 1 PFLOPS AI compute, 1.6 TB/s bandwidth, FP8 to FP64, and it explicitly supports GLM-5.x and Qwen3.5+.
- Differentiator: the only Chinese vendor doing gaming and AI on one architecture, with DX12 Ultimate, the only Chinese graphics API at that level.

Biren Technology, outspending its own revenue

https://preview.redd.it/dyi57p75w39h1.png?width=3000&format=png&auto=webp&s=9af403068bc89bd632939fbc1b12632ccfc4698a

- Revenue (2025): ¥1.03B (~$150M), up 207% year over year, gross margin 53.8%.
- IPO: Hong Kong (06082.HK), Jan 2026, the year's first major listing, raised about $624M, cash position over .
- BR20X: next gen, 2026, FP8/FP4, inference-optimized.
- The tell: Biren spent more on R&D (¥1.48B) than it earned (¥1.03B), R&D at 144% of revenue. That's not a company milking a product. That's a company sprinting.

Iluvatar CoreX, the edge play

https://preview.redd.it/rh0ix5g7w39h1.png?width=3000&format=png&auto=webp&s=20d2a866b67ca1e97b4294d5082522a5703d5e18

- Revenue (2025): ¥1.03B (~$149M), up 92% year over year, GPU business at 89% of revenue and up 150% year over year.
- IPO: Hong Kong, Jan 8 2026, about $4.5B valuation, raised ~$475M, 340+ customers across finance, healthcare, and transport.
- Data-center line: BiV100 (32GB), BiV150 (64GB), BiV200 (80GB), B300 (144GB).
- Edge line (the sleeper): the TY-series, tiny boxes from 130 to 300 TOPS, Orin-class, plug-and-play, drop-in replacements for NVIDIA's edge modules at a fraction of the price. Iluvatar built it because its backers are retail companies that need cheap edge inference for robots and IoT.

https://preview.redd.it/r36mcsh8w39h1.png?width=3000&format=png&auto=webp&s=c49060b80ae3602c64cdafc6bc6d054e60a890f9

Founder Li Yunpeng is ex-Oracle R&D. The roadmap openly states the goal: beat NVIDIA Rubin within two years.

The shift nobody's pricing in

Three things are happening at once, and together they're a regime change.

1. Production moved home. All the new parts (Ascend 950, MetaX C600, Iluvatar's 300-series) are shifting from TSMC to SMIC. Officially "12nm." (In the talk Shilov claims the real node is well below that and nobody admits it on paper. Take that as his read, not a fact.)
2. NVIDIA's China share is collapsing. Per IDC, about 2.2M GPUs shipped to China in 2025, likely one of the last big NVIDIA waves. NVIDIA's share fell from 95% to 55% in two years, a 40-point drop. When the US floated easing sanctions in June, the Chinese answer was reportedly: thanks, no longer needed. Datacenter utilization for Chinese cards is near 100%, with a roughly 3-month queue for new servers.

https://preview.redd.it/c13mtolaw39h1.png?width=3000&format=png&auto=webp&s=3064d9e64dbd6f96c92d3e006ec7006adadc45c0

3. The models are following the metal. This is the part that matters most for anyone running open weights. Chinese open-source models are increasingly optimized for Chinese silicon first. DeepSeek-V4 is the canary: part of why it slipped is that it's being tuned for domestic GPUs. Qwen will follow (it's Alibaba). The rest will too. And right now, essentially every good open-weight model is Chinese.

Put those together and you get a line I think will age well. Within about two years, the talk argues, China flips from importing AI chips to exporting them.

Why I care, and why you should

I'm not a geopolitics account. I care because of a very concrete thing sitting under my desk.

Today I run Chinese open models on Western silicon: 4×3090, 96GB, llama.cpp, vLLM, SGLang. That setup is the bridge. But the models I'm running are being tuned for hardware that isn't NVIDIA, by teams that used to be NVIDIA and AMD, shipping into a market that's already 45 points less NVIDIA than it was two years ago.

The Chinese GPU story isn't a sanctions footnote. It's a parallel hardware ecosystem with its own form factor, interconnect, HBM, and fabs, and its own models being co-designed with the metal. The West is busy debating who gets to sell H20s. The question for the rest of us is quietly becoming simpler: in two years, what's actually in the box?

I run Chinese open models on NVIDIA today. My next box might not be NVIDIA at all. That's the shift I'm watching, even if the West isn't.

Edit: rewrote the full article, a few of you (fairly) didn't want to leave for Twitter. All 7 vendors and sources are above.

Anyway, I'll be glad to see you at that very place: https://x.com/superalesha/status/2069415581237813437