SHANGHAI – Chinese technology giant Huawei said Monday it had achieved a breakthrough that would allow it to make cutting-edge chips within five years, presenting the news as an important step in Beijing’s efforts to circumvent US technological restrictions.
With the United States and China vying for world domination artificial intelligenceU.S. sanctions that began in 2019 have largely cut Huawei off from global makers of semiconductor chips, the tiny brains that power everything from smartphones to computers to cars.
Washington has also limited Beijing’s access to chip design software and semiconductor manufacturing equipment such as lithography machines, leading the Chinese government to invest billions in developing its own semiconductor supply chain.
Huawei said Monday at a technology conference in Shanghai that by 2031, its high-end chips will have a transistor density equivalent to 1.4 nanometers, which is considered the industry’s leading.
This compares to China’s most advanced 7-nanometer chip manufacturing capacity, and the 2-nanometer manufacturing technology used by Taiwan-based TSMC, the world’s leading maker of advanced chips. TSMC, which makes chips for US tech giant Nvidia, has announced plans to start mass production with a 1.4-nanometer process in 2028.
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He Tingbo, president of Huawei’s semiconductor business, said in a speech that Huawei has proposed a revolutionary “LogicFolding” design for its future Kirin chips. This means that instead of achieving performance gains by shrinking transistors — a process requiring extreme ultraviolet lithography machines that China doesn’t have access to — Huawei folds traditional 2D circuits into 3D vertical skyscrapers, essentially stacking chips on top of each other.
Huawei, which provided no independent performance data to back up its announcement, also launched a new principle on Monday called the Tau Scaling Law, which aims to reduce the time it takes for data to move through chips by folding and stacking them.
This is a departure from Moore’s Law, which has long guided the industry with the idea of putting more transistors on smaller chips, but which is widely seen as approaching its limits.
“Sooner or later, the industry will face these problems,” He, who is known in China’s tech industry as Huawei’s “chip queen,” told reporters through a translator after her speech. “We have confidence in this path because we have practice as proof.”
The new methodology is not without challenges, he said. Traditional tools are not yet sufficient for large-scale free logic design, she said, and thermal management remains a critical issue since components are stacked vertically.
“Cost, power, heat and system integration remain major challenges” for Chinese technology, according to analyst Brady Wang, associate director at Counterpoint Research.
“In the short term, China may close the gap with world leaders, but a technological gap with the most advanced nodes will persist,” he told the Reuters news agency.
But with the paradigm shift from Moore’s Law to Tau’s Scaling Law (nicknamed “Her’s Law” in homage to He), Huawei could circumvent the shortage of lithography machines and take a step closer to self-reliance in the global chip race.
On Chinese social media platform Weibo, the hashtag #HuaweiSemiconductorFieldNewBreakthrough has generated 40 million views and counting.
Some commentators have described it as the “DeepSeek moment” for the Chinese chip industry, referring to a AI model released by Chinese start-up last year it was said to match or surpass leading American models at a fraction of the cost.
Others said U.S. sanctions had encouraged Chinese innovation.
“The more sanctions there are from the West, the more breakthroughs China will make!” » wrote one Weibo user.
After US restrictions sent it into “survival mode”, Huawei made its return in 2023 with the launch of its Mate 60 series of smartphones, whose surprisingly advanced 5G chip, produced in China, raised questions about whether the restrictions still worked.
In September last year, Huawei announced a three-year roadmap for building AI chips, filling the void left by Nvidia’s exclusion from the Chinese market. Although the Trump administration said late last year that Nvidia could sell its powerful H200 chip for some Chinese companies, no orders have been placed.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on May 14.Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty ImagesNVIDIA CEO Jensen Huangwho traveled with the president Donald Trump in China this month for a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, told CNBC last week, his company had “largely conceded” the Chinese chip market to Huawei.
But on Saturday he suggested the Chinese market would remain an important source of long-term demand, telling reporters Taiwan that China was part of the $200 billion market he had predicted for Nvidia’s new “Vera” CPUs.
Chinese state media said after Huawei’s announcement Monday that the United States and China should find ways to cooperate where possible.
“China does not deny the existence of competition, but such competition should be moderate and healthy, aiming for mutual progress rather than zero-sum games,” read a comment posted on a social media account associated with CCTV, China’s state broadcaster.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said last week that Trump and Xi agreed at their summit in Beijing to launch an intergovernmental dialogue on AI.
The United States and China “should work together to promote the development and governance of AI,” Guo Jiakun told reporters, “and to ensure that AI better serves the progress of human civilization.”
Janis Mackey Frayer and Dawn Liu reported from Shanghai, and Jennifer Jett from Hong Kong.
