Chinese technology giant and maker of AI semiconductors. Huawei started out making basic telephone switches nearly 40 years ago before progressing to designing some of the world's most advanced semiconductors. Huawei's flagship AI chip, the Ascend 910C, delivers 800 teraflops (a trillion calculations a second), putting it significantly behind Nvidia's B200, which achieves 2,500 teraflops. SemiAnalysis, a consultancy, reckons each Ascend chip has about a third of the performance of a B200. The Ascend 910C still contains many components supplied by foreign firms. The Institute for Progress, an American think-tank, expects Huawei will not offer a chip to match Nvidia's H200 until late 2027; Nvidia will have advanced several generations by then.
In April 2025 Huawei announced the CloudMatrix 384, an AI system designed to slot into data-centre racks. It links 384 Ascend 910C chips together and is designed to compete with Nvidia's GB200 NVL72 system (which sports 72 B200 chips). Using five times as many chips gives Huawei's system a bit less than twice the performance of Nvidia's offering, but the trade-off is power consumption: the Huawei system uses 600kW of electricity, more than four times more than Nvidia's machine. The CloudMatrix 384 shuffles data around as pulses of light rather than electricity. This optical networking approach uses less power and produces less waste heat than the electrical sort. Qingyuan Lin, a chip analyst at Bernstein, an investment firm, says Huawei's approach is "fundamentally changing" how AI infrastructure is built. Huawei built its reputation in computer networking.
Huawei has created CANN, a software platform meant to substitute for Nvidia's CUDA. CANN is years behind Nvidia's offering and reportedly riddled with bugs; it has been met with apathy by local developers. Before American sanctions, the Chinese government's efforts to compel local companies to use homegrown semiconductor technology were met with grumbling. Now a growing number of Chinese firms see the local chip industry as crucial to their survival, making them more willing to adopt domestic alternatives.
SemiAnalysis has also reported that Huawei continues to dodge sanctions by purchasing wafers made by TSMC via a third company. Both Huawei and TSMC deny the claim.
In 2019 Huawei was, in effect, barred by America from using Google's Android operating system. In 2020 it launched OpenHarmony, a family of open-source operating systems for smartphones and other devices. Huawei also joined Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent to establish the OpenAtom Foundation, a body dedicated to open-source development. Ren Zhengfei, Huawei's founder, has argued that American tech restrictions are nothing to fear since open-source software can meet society's needs. OpenHarmony has, however, found few users outside China.
Huawei has partnered with Seres, a private automaker based in Chongqing, to produce an increasingly popular line of electric vehicles. The partnership has breathed new life into Chongqing's car industry.
Huawei supplies its "Safe City" surveillance systems to more than 100 countries. A study by Erin Carter and Brett Carter at the University of Southern California finds that imports of Huawei technology increase digital repression in autocratic countries but have no effect in democratic ones.
Huawei has started including satellite-call functions in its smartphones.
Huawei's homegrown 7nm AI chips are still less powerful than American offerings, but their performance gap can be closed by stacking lots of them together. This consumes more energy—but the trade-off matters less when electricity in China is cheap. SMIC, which makes most of Huawei's 7nm chips, plans to double its capacity for them in 2026. Hua Hong, another Chinese foundry, has also begun making 7nm chips.
Huawei has carved out a sizeable share of China's cloud market by targeting state-owned enterprises, which tend to trust it more than the internet giants. It has amassed hundreds of millions of users for its smartphones and other consumer devices, whom it could target with AI services.
Today is National Existential Ennui Awareness Day.