The United States has been trying to put Huawei offside for five years. Well, although it started with Huaweithere has actually been a years-long trade war with China, which implies a escalation of tariffssanctions and blacklists for some companies. This means that public organizations cannot use technology from these companies (although later they skip it to the bullfighter) and that both American and some European companies cannot make deals with China if this means putting the security of the United States at risk.
Concrete examples: Nvidia could not sell its best AI chips in China and the European ASML cannot sell its best advanced photolithography machines to Chinese foundries. The objective was condemn Chinese companies and its technology to ostracism, but it turns out that the opposite has happened and the current pHuawei resident has a message for the United States.
Thank you.
Huawei and the technological boost thanks to the United States
Before continuing with the context, because there is a lot to tell, let’s get to the chicha. Recently, within the framework of the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems held in Shanghai, Huawei presented its technological roadmap. Not one focused on the product, but on the chips, on their ambitions and on their new technologies.
At one point during the event, Xu Zhijun (current president of the Chinese company) stood on stage to thank publicly the tight control that the United States has exercised over the West’s commercial and diplomatic channels with China in recent years. The most notable thing about the presentation is Huawei’s plans to manufacture chips with a density similar to those of 1.4 nanometersbut without the necessary machinery to do so.
As we say, ASML cannot sell the most advanced machines to Chinese companies, so companies like SMIC or Huawei itself They are managing to stay in the technological race. They use strategies such as “impressions” of many layers on the wafers or, directly, reverse engineering, and Huawei has something they have called ‘Tau Scaling Law’.
Instead of going the traditional route by making transistors physically smaller to achieve denser chips by miniaturizing components, what they are developing is a method to reduce the travel time of signals within the chips. That is, the chips do not have physically smaller components, but thanks to the reduction of internal ‘wiring’ and latency, the density of the transistors will be similar to that of chips made with extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment.
It is an extremely complicated path to achieve results that can be similar and, in essence, a sample of all the turns that the company must take because they cannot access those ASML SVU machines. However, it’s also something Huawei (and the Chinese industry, in general) is grateful for. Literally.
As I say, at one point during the presentation, Xu Zhijun commented that “if the United States had not put pressure on our country, we would not have achieved this,” crowning the phrase with a “we are grateful to them”.
Because, in the end, exactly what Jensen Huang (CEO of Nvidia) and other industry experts warned a long time ago has happened: sanctions were not going to work not to stop the Chinese technology sector, but also to find tools and alternatives to boost their industry in record time.
These measures include the aforementioned reverse technology or Huawei’s new LogicFolding architecture to much more conventional ones like that of buy smuggling technology or industrial espionage. What Huang pointed out a few months ago was that Nvidia (and the United States) could not miss the opportunity to be in China.
“If the United States had not pressured our country, we would not have achieved this. We are grateful to them”
Because China was going to find a way to catch up and compete with the United States, but if they were put under increasing pressure, the effort was going to be greater and, furthermore, they were not going to be able to take advantage of selling technology until then. This is why Nvidia got permission to sell their H200 GPUs (with 25% tariffs) to China not so long ago, something that came too latewhen China seems to no longer need them.
Either way, Huawei is expected to start selling Kirin chips (the ones inside its phones) built with this new technology before the end of 2026. The company aims toSimilar density to traditional 3nm noteswith the goal of reaching that equivalence with 1.4nm chips by 2031. In fact, they point that in recent years they have already been manufacturing chips using this approach on a trial basis, but it is now that the trial has been opened.
We will also have to wait for technological analyzes by third parties to see if Huawei’s claims are correct, of course. What is undeniable is that, whether the figures used by Huawei are true or not, China has technological sovereignty between its eyebrows. And its latest five-year plan is a declaration of intent to achieve superiority in the very short term.
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