While Huawei can buy off-the-shelf or commodity mobile chips from a third party like Samsung Electronics or MediaTek, it couldn’t possibly get enough and may have to make costly compromises on performance in basic products, they added.
That unit surged in prominence precisely because it’s viewed as a saviour in an era of American containment, and its silicon now matches rivals’ like Qualcomm’s and powers many of Huawei’s products: the Kirin chips for phones, Ascend for AI and Kunpeng for servers.
Should Washington get serious about throttling that spigot, Huawei won’t be able to get any of the advanced silicon it designs into the real world — stymieing efforts to craft its own processors for mobile devices and radio frequency chips for 5G base stations, to name just two of the most vital in-house components.
In fact, the latest curbs could severely disrupt production of some of the more critical and visible products in Huawei’s portfolio, including the “Kirin” brains and communications chips of future 5G phones, AI learning chips for its cloud services and servers, and the most basic kinds of chips for networking.
In February, Huawei touted how its next-generation antenna chips have been installed in “the industry’s highest-performance” 5G base stations.
