“This is the first time China has proposed a new principle for the chip industry.” Not everyone is convinced

Huawei’s path in recent years has been most curious. After being ostracized by the West and being the target of the trade war between the US of Trump’s first term and China, has become the company that thank the United States because of how vetoes have boosted Chinese technology. Because Huawei has become one of the pillars of all the technology companies in the country and they are not satisfied with making chips: they want to lead a new paradigm with a Tau Law that challenges the Moore’s Law.

But behind the promises, there are those who can only see one thing: marketing.

The Tau Law. My partner Laura exemplified it perfectly. If the chip is a city, the transistors are the buildings, and the cables are the roads, Moore’s Law says: “make buildings smaller to fit more into the same space.” What Huawei proposes, however, goes in another direction: “buildings can no longer be much smaller, so instead let’s make cars travel faster on the roads, and redesign the urban layout so that they travel less distance.”

Huawei’s bet is that cars take much less time to go from one building to another, reducing times tremendously so that the chip, without the need to work on smaller lithographs, is much faster. Inside that Tau LawHuawei proposes the LogicFolding architecture, focused on shortening the wiring of the critical paths to increase the density of the transistors.

Qionists. And the company is tremendously proud of this to the point that He Tingbo, Huawei’s chip director, affirms that “it is the first time that China proposes a new principle for the global chip industry.” Because, until now, Moore’s Law was the one that prevailed in lithography leaps, but if instead of concentrating on achieving the very complicated objective of making everything smaller, companies focus on shortening the “routes”, the density objective can be achieved in other ways.

In fact, Huawei maintains that, before LogicFound, it took three years to go from 126 to 155 million transistors per mm2. In 2026, and with the new architecture, they jumped directly to 238 per mm2.

Equivalence, not parity. And if the question is why Huawei is pushing this when there was already another viable way, the answer is that that proven way was not as viable for Chinese companies. Due to the technological veto, they cannot access the most sophisticated machines in Europe ASMLso they can’t “print” chips in advanced lithography as easily as TSMC can, for example.

Thus, they have looked for another way to achieve that density, but something important is the terms. Because there is talk that Huawei would reach a transistor density “equivalent” to that of 1.4 nm processes, by 2031, and that is the key. They would be “equivalent” in density and there would be no lithographic parity.

With raised eyebrow. In any case, Tingbo is proud of the logo and believes that it can benefit the entire Chinese technology ecosystem, but it makes an appeal. The directive states that “there remain many open questions that no organization can address alone. The tool chain, standards and economic models require contributions from more than one company.”

For its part, and as we see in The Registerthere are those who do not see that revolution in the Tau Law. Although they see what the Chinese company is proposing as interesting, they affirm that it is more of a hybrid movement between reality and marketing because “Huawei had to get creative” to overcome the limitations and “they are going in the right direction, but this density is created through packaging and not by making smaller transistors“Indeed, this is what we already had, but they point out that the result will not be equivalent to a true 1.4 nm node from TSMC or Intel in issues such as energy efficiency and temperature.

Future. In fact, as our colleagues point out Xataka Mobileit is in thermal management where Huawei is encountering some major problems. But well, the company’s intention is that the results of this Tau Law allow massive AI clusters that they behave as a single chip by 2035 and that the upcoming Kirin chips for consumption also benefit from it.

Image | IBM (edited)

In Xataka | While the industry obsesses over power, TSMC is clear about where the future of chips lies: in efficiency