At the import expo in Shanghai, the state-owned buyers sign in batches: one company, then the next, through a single long ceremony.
The papers they sign cover the things China does not make enough of: etching machines, exposure tools, aircraft engines, integrated circuits.
That is the half of the AI buildout that gets the least attention. The substitution story — domestic chips taking share — is the half that gets the headlines, and both are true at once.
Key takeaways
- The ninth China International Import Expo closed on 10 November 2026 with US$85.45bn in intended one-year turnover, up 2.3%, and 4,142 overseas exhibitors.
- Central state-owned enterprises accounted for US$15.52bn of technology-equipment deals, up 17.6%, raising that category from 8.6% to 10.7% of their purchases (SASAC).
- China Electronics signed US$1.128bn for integrated circuits and modules with AMD; AVIC bought exposure tools and etchers from Nikon and Tokyo Electron.
- Huawei's Ascend holds about 50% of China's AI accelerator market in 2026, up from about 40%, while Nvidia fell to about 8% (Bernstein Research, cited by AP).
- None of these are contracts. Expo figures are intentions, and the category totals mix AI with machine tools, engines and displays.
Three words that are not the same number
The expo's headline is intended turnover (意向成交), counted on a one-year basis: US$85.45bn, up 2.3% on the eighth edition (the organiser, 10 November 2026). It is a statement of what buyers said they would take, not what they paid.
Inside that, the state-asset commission publishes a separate figure for its central enterprises (中央企业): technology equipment (技术装备) at US$15.52bn of planned turnover (拟成交), up 17.6%, and 10.7% of their total against 8.6% a year earlier.
The two numbers have different populations and cannot be divided into each other. The only defensible comparison is the share, and the share is the story: the state buyers' cart is shifting from resources toward capability, while the expo's overall turnover barely moved.
Coal, oil, gas and ore still dominate. Crude and minerals accounted for more than US$120bn of intended turnover, gas US$8.81bn (up 44%) and refined products US$2.47bn (up 115%). Three oil majors alone signed more than US$73.7bn.
What was actually in the folders
The disclosed line items are narrow and specific, which is what makes them useful.
China Electronics signed US$1.128bn with AMD for integrated circuits and modules. AVIC went to Nikon and Tokyo Electron for exposure tools and dry-etch equipment. China National Machinery bought a film-production line from Germany's Brückner. China Eastern, first to sign, took US$540m including a large spare-engine order from CFM International.
None of the disclosed line items is an AI accelerator. That absence is the point: the scarce inputs in this buildout are the tools that make chips and the memories that feed them, and those are still bought abroad.
Work the arithmetic from the other direction. Huawei's Ascend reached roughly half of China's AI accelerator market in 2026, with Nvidia down to about 8% from about 40% (Bernstein Research, cited by AP, 2026). Domestic share of a market is not the same as domestic capability to supply it.
Why both numbers can be true
China can hold half of its own accelerator market and still import the equipment that produces it. Ascend dies are made at SMIC, whose N+2 7nm yield was reported around 40% in early 2025, up from about 20% in September 2024 (DigiTimes). Stacked memory binds harder: domestic output of roughly 2 million HBM stacks in 2026 covers only 250,000 to 300,000 Ascend-class packages, a ceiling that applies once the stockpile imported before the December 2024 controls runs down (SemiAnalysis).
Because the constraint sits upstream, the import bill does not fall when the domestic share rises. It moves: fewer finished accelerators, more tools, more wafers, more test equipment. A procurement list is a better map of the bottleneck than a market-share chart.
The aggregate picture is consistent with that. The Council on Foreign Relations estimates Huawei produced about 5% of Nvidia's aggregate AI compute in 2025, falling toward about 2% by 2027, with a median near 1%.
Who is signing, and what it signals
The buyers are not startups. Central enterprises sent more than 20,000 people to the expo to negotiate, and by the end of September they had joint ventures with 301 firms in 39 countries and regions, with cumulative foreign capital drawn in above US$120bn (SASAC).
Their European purchases of technology equipment reached US$5.15bn, up 24.8%, with nuclear and power-construction groups signing turbine and fuel-assembly work with Siemens Energy and Framatome. That is procurement as industrial policy: the same groups are the anchor customers for domestic substitution at home.
SASAC has also launched a programme it calls Changjing Wanxiang (场景万象), releasing a first batch of flagship scenarios open to outside participants. For a foreign supplier, that is the door worth watching — not the expo total.
Inbound investment tells the same story from the other side. High-technology industries drew RMB 228.5 billion (≈US$32.2bn / HK$251bn) of foreign direct investment in the first three quarters of 2026, up 33.8% and 41.6% of the total (MOFCOM, cited by People's Daily, 6 November 2026).
Honest limitations
The US$15.52bn is a category, not a list: it aggregates integrated circuits, AI and general equipment, and SASAC does not publish an AI-only split. The named deals are the ones disclosed in press materials, so the sample is biased toward large, presentable contracts. Expo figures are intentions counted on a one-year basis and are routinely revised; they are not revenue. The AMD agreement is described as integrated circuits and modules with no product mix, so it cannot be read as an AI-chip purchase. Currency conversions here use the column's fixed rate of ¥7.1 to the dollar, not the rate on the day.
What readers can do now
- For analysts, track the technology-equipment share (8.6% to 10.7%) across editions rather than the absolute total. The share moves with policy; the total moves with commodity prices.
- For suppliers, ask a Chinese customer for its localisation target by equipment line, not by company. A 70% target at the firm level can leave an entire tool class untouched.
- For newsrooms, do not divide the state buyers' US$15.52bn by the expo's US$85.45bn. Different populations, different definitions of "turnover".