Huawei / HiSilicon

Full briefing

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. was founded in Shenzhen in 1987 and grew to become the world's largest telecommunications equipment vendor and second-largest smartphone maker. Its chip design subsidiary HiSilicon Technologies, established in 2004, became China's most capable fabless IC designer, developing the Kirin series of mobile SoCs used in Huawei's flagship smartphones and the Ascend series of AI accelerators used in Huawei's cloud and edge computing infrastructure. At its peak before 2020, HiSilicon's Kirin 990 5G SoC was manufactured by TSMC at 7nm, making Huawei one of the few companies in the world — alongside Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung — capable of designing 7nm-class silicon. The Ascend 910 AI accelerator, also manufactured by TSMC, was positioned as a domestic alternative to NVIDIA's data-center GPUs, capable of training large language models. The U.S. Entity List addition in May 2019 restricted U.S. software and technology companies from supplying tools to Huawei/HiSilicon without a license. A more sweeping measure followed in May 2020: the Foreign Direct Product Rule (FDPR) was amended to cover any chip that uses U.S. semiconductor manufacturing equipment or EDA software anywhere in the world when manufactured for Huawei. TSMC halted all Huawei orders in September 2020 in compliance with this rule. Since then, Huawei's advanced chip production has shifted to SMIC. The 2023 Kirin 9000s, found in the Mate 60 Pro, demonstrated that SMIC could produce something in the 7nm class using multi-patterning DUV — though at far lower yields and throughput than TSMC. HiSilicon continues to design chips at the frontier of what SMIC can manufacture, making the Huawei–SMIC relationship the most closely watched benchmark for China's indigenous semiconductor progress.