Rakesh Kumar says US chip controls backfired as China gains ground

Rakesh Kumar has a gracious way of gloating. “I’m not going to say ‘I told you so,'” Kumar said. “But it really is ‘I told you so.'” The professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has spent four years as one of Washington’s most persistent academic critics. His target: the US effort to freeze China’s chip industry in place through export controls. The numbers behind the told-you-so Start with Nvidia. In the first half of 2026, the company’s share of China’s AI accelerator market fell to 34%, a decline of 44% year-over-year. That translates to 678,000 units shipped. Still a big number, but a much smaller slice of a growing pie. Huawei, meanwhile, climbed to a 28% share over the same period, shipping 572,000 AI accelerators in China. Local companies are increasingly swapping in domestic hardware where foreign products used to sit. Total AI accelerator shipments in China surged to approximately 2 million units in the first half of 2026. The mix is also changing. The data points to a shift toward non-GPU chips, which matters because GPUs are Nvidia’s home turf. What the controls did, and didn’t, do None of this means export controls ...