China's security bodies just handed Beijing a new procurement bible: nine homegrown AI chips cleared for government and state-owned enterprise use under the Anke framework. Huawei's Ascend 310 and 910, Alibaba's T-Head Zhenwu M530 and M890, plus offerings from Biren, Hygon, Iluvatar CoreX, MetaX, and Moore Threads all made the cut. Cambricon and Kunlunxin sat this round out despite prior nods.

The certifications, valid for three years and issued jointly by the China Information Technology Security Evaluation Centre and the National Secrecy Science and Technology Evaluation Centre, slot into the Xinchuang self-reliance push. They expand the trusted list beyond CPUs and databases into a fresh "AI training and inference chips" category. Domestic players already claimed 41% of China's AI GPU shipments last year with 1.65 million units delivered; Huawei alone moved roughly 812,000 Ascend chips and eyes $12 billion in processor revenue for 2026.

US export controls were supposed to starve the market. Instead they forced a parallel stack that now carries legal weight for state buyers. SMIC's fab constraints and N+2 node limits remain real bottlenecks, but the procurement catalog just locked in the direction. Nvidia's China foothold keeps shrinking while Beijing writes the rules for its own silicon future.

The memo reads like a quiet declaration: the dependency era is ending on paper first, then in every approved data center.