Jon Peddie Research: there are 18 companies globally developing and producing GPUs; eight out of the 11 PC and data center GPU designers are based in China
Anton Shilov / Tom's Hardware :
Context & Ripple Effects
Jon Peddie Research's headcount arrives at the bottom of a historic GPU slump: discrete GPU shipments fell 42% YoY to roughly 14M units in Q3 2022, the weakest quarter since at least 2005, after an even steeper 14.9% QoQ decline in Q2 hit Nvidia hardest. Against that contraction, the firm counts 18 companies worldwide still developing and producing GPUs — and finds eight of the 11 PC and data center GPU designers are based in China.
That depth matters because it predates the payoff: by 2025, IDC counted Chinese GPU and AI chipmakers holding nearly 41% of China's AI server market, cutting Nvidia to about 55% there. The design bench JPR tallied in late 2022 is the population from which those challengers came.
First-order effects
- Nvidia, AMD, and Intel now compete against a field where the majority of PC and data center GPU designers are Chinese firms, most of them shielded from Western competition inside their home market by export controls on advanced chips flowing into China.
Second-order effects
- Chinese designers route around controls rather than idle: sources report they increasingly use Malaysian firms to assemble high-end GPUs, a move that stays within US rules while keeping export-restricted designs shippable.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the GPU industry structurally splits into two partially closed ecosystems — a Western trio serving most of the world and a Chinese cohort serving its own — with export controls acting less as a ceiling on China's designer count than as a tariff wall around its demand.
The trend: GPU supply is bifurcating into parallel Western and Chinese ecosystems, with US export controls accelerating China's buildout of a domestic second-source compute base.