Huawei prepares for launch, though of what product remains a secret

Huawei Technologies, the Chinese telecommunications giant, was reeling from US sanctions in 2020, cut off from key chip supplies. Last year, though, it stunned Washington with a new smartphone featuring an advanced semiconductor.

Now, the company is poised to reach another milestone.

Huawei's autumn launch event, scheduled for Monday and Tuesday in Shenzhen, will be led by its secretive chip design unit, HiSilicon. When the announcement of the event was first made, it sparked significant speculation thousands of miles away in the US.

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Some US industry analysts anticipate that Huawei will unveil a groundbreaking artificial intelligence semiconductor that could be capable of rivalling high-end chips that American tech giants like Nvidia are prohibited from selling to China.

Such a development, they say, might undercut the market share that Nvidia and other US chip companies have built in China and the Global South. It could also nudge Washington to reconsider its sanctions-based approach to curbing China's technological progress.

Even so, the US government took one more step on Friday to restrict advanced tech access for rivals like China, when the Commerce Department announced that it was tightened export controls on quantum computing and advanced chipmaking tools.

The interim rules include exemptions for countries that adopt similar measures. Notably, the Netherlands, home to the Dutch tech giant ASML, has also expanded its export restrictions on advanced chipmaking technologies.

Huawei faces significant challenges, analysts say, including reported performance issues and difficulties in mass-producing advanced chips due to those US restrictions and an underdeveloped semiconductor ecosystem.

Industry experts also note that Huawei is under intense pressure to release new products to compete with its US and South Korean rivals. The conference may reveal innovations beyond telecoms and chips, reflecting the company's portfolio expansion over the past five years.

According to Long Le from Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business, the conference may spotlight two sets of its chips: the Kirin 9000s series for smartphones and the A910 series designed for advanced AI models.

Le thinks that Huawei might introduce the most advanced version of its A910 series yet: the A910-C, an upgrade from the A910-B chip.

"There's a lot of speculation about whether this will compete with Nvidia's H100 or B20 chips," he said, adding, "I do think that the Huawei A910-C will be quite comparable to Nvidia's H100."

Huawei is already a significant competitor to Nvidia in China, Le said, adding that "a lot of companies" were testing the A910-C.

A Nvidia HGX H100 artificial intelligence supercomputing graphics processing unit (GPU) on display at the company's offices in Taipei on June 2, 2023. Photo: Bloomberg alt=A Nvidia HGX H100 artificial intelligence supercomputing graphics processing unit (GPU) on display at the company's offices in Taipei on June 2, 2023. Photo: Bloomberg>

Any breakthrough in this series, he said, would underscore how US bans on selling to Chinese companies might be driving increased innovation within China.

In October 2022, the Commerce Department enacted export controls to limit China's access to advanced computing chips, hinder its development and maintenance of supercomputers and restrict its semiconductor manufacturing capabilities.

The ban prompted Nvidia, a tech company based in Santa Clara, California, to develop three chips specifically for the Chinese market. The most advanced Nvidia chip now available in China is the H20, a version of its H200 chip offered to other customers that is capable of running AI workloads while using lower computing power.

The research group SemiAnalysis has estimated that Nvidia could sell over 1 million H20 chips in China this year, generating around $12 billion in revenue. Due to weaker-than-anticipated demand when deliveries began in January, Nvidia has reportedly priced the H20 below a competing chip from Huawei.

The Chinese economy represented about 17 per cent of Nvidia's revenue for the year ending in January, down from 26 per cent two years earlier - due in no small part to those US sanctions and increased competition by China-based chip makers.

"It's really interesting to see that the ban has really created this innovation and self-reliance, paradoxically," Le said. If Huawei introduces a significant breakthrough at the conference, he said, US President Joe Biden might need to re-evaluate the sanctions his administration has imposed.

According to Anil Khurana, executive director of Georgetown University's Baratta Center for Global Business, while the A910 series competes with Nvidia's H100, there remains a significant performance gap but pricing and production could be the key.

A "breakthrough" at the conference, he said, could only occur if the company makes new manufacturing-related announcements. "That's where Huawei always had big challenges, and that's not easy, because to do that they would have had to build a whole ecosystem," Khurana added.

Even so, Khurana contended, Nvidia will "certainly lose market share in China, whether it's in two months or six months", saying that Huawei, with the A910, could offer "an affordable chip for AI, an affordable platform for the Global South".

"So the market for Huawei then is Africa, Asia and parts of Europe as well," Khurana said.

Huawei advertises its Mate 60 smartphone, powered by a Kirin 9000s chip, on a company store in Shanghai on August 31, 2023. Photo: EPA-EFE alt=Huawei advertises its Mate 60 smartphone, powered by a Kirin 9000s chip, on a company store in Shanghai on August 31, 2023. Photo: EPA-EFE>

Huawei is also expected to unveil its "three-fold" phone during the conference - within hours of the US tech goliath Apple's launch of its iPhone 16 series.

Paul Triolo of the Albright Stonebridge Group, a Washington-based consulting firm, noted that "there is a lot of pressure on Huawei to continue to release new products". Those include advanced core semiconductors, cutting-edge smartphones and server chips essential for training large language models.

"The company remains under tremendous pressure to continue to show it can develop more advanced products and keep pace with the likes of Apple, Samsung and even Nvidia in the raw computing and consumer performance space," he said.

Triolo noted that Huawei has evolved into a multifaceted technology conglomerate, with involvement in AI development, telecommunications hardware, consumer goods, autonomous vehicles and more.

"Whatever happens at the conference, Huawei's continued resurrection as the country's top innovative technology company - that has been able to withstand the full might of a nation-state arrayed against it - remains assured," he said.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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