Abstract We prove decomposition theorems for sparse positive (semi)definite polynomial matrices that can be viewed as sparsity-exploiting versions of the Hilbert–Artin, Reznick, Putinar, and Putinar–Vasilescu Positivstellensätze. First, we establish a matrix P ( x ) with chordal sparsity is semidefinite all $$x\in \mathbb {R}^n$$ <mml:mr...