Huawei / HiSilicon
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. / HiSilicon Technologies Co., Ltd.
Market Share
~#1 China AI accelerator (Ascend 910B/C); ~35% China premium smartphone SoC (Kirin)
Key Product
Kirin 9000s (5G SoC), Ascend 910 AI accelerator
Bottleneck Status
Cut off from TSMC since 2020; relies on SMIC for advanced designs
Full briefing▼ Expand
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. was founded in Shenzhen in 1987 and grew to become the world's largest telecommunications equipment vendor and second-largest smartphone maker. Its chip design subsidiary HiSilicon Technologies, established in 2004, became China's most capable fabless IC designer, developing the Kirin series of mobile SoCs used in Huawei's flagship smartphones and the Ascend series of AI accelerators used in Huawei's cloud and edge computing infrastructure. At its peak before 2020, HiSilicon's Kirin 990 5G SoC was manufactured by TSMC at 7nm, making Huawei one of the few companies in the world — alongside Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung — capable of designing 7nm-class silicon. The Ascend 910 AI accelerator, also manufactured by TSMC, was positioned as a domestic alternative to NVIDIA's data-center GPUs, capable of training large language models. The U.S. Entity List addition in May 2019 restricted U.S. software and technology companies from supplying tools to Huawei/HiSilicon without a license. A more sweeping measure followed in May 2020: the Foreign Direct Product Rule (FDPR) was amended to cover any chip that uses U.S. semiconductor manufacturing equipment or EDA software anywhere in the world when manufactured for Huawei. TSMC halted all Huawei orders in September 2020 in compliance with this rule. Since then, Huawei's advanced chip production has shifted to SMIC. The 2023 Kirin 9000s, found in the Mate 60 Pro, demonstrated that SMIC could produce something in the 7nm class using multi-patterning DUV — though at far lower yields and throughput than TSMC. HiSilicon continues to design chips at the frontier of what SMIC can manufacture, making the Huawei–SMIC relationship the most closely watched benchmark for China's indigenous semiconductor progress.
Connected companies
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Critical path — raw silicon to deployment
The tightest single-source dependencies, in order.
EDA TOOLS
Cadence
Virtuoso (analog), Genus/Innovus (digital synthesis), Tempus (timing signoff)
EDA TOOLS
Synopsys
Design Compiler (synthesis), PrimeTime (timing), VCS (simulation), IC Compiler 2
CHIP IP
Arm Holdings
Cortex-A/X CPUs, Neoverse cloud cores, Ethos NPU IP
CHIP DESIGNERS
Huawei / HiSilicon
Kirin 9000s (5G SoC), Ascend 910 AI accelerator
CLOUD PROVIDERS
Huawei Cloud
Huawei Cloud EI (AI), Ascend 910-based ModelArts platform
CLOUD PROVIDERS
Tencent Cloud
Tencent Cloud AI, Hunyuan LLM, GPU HPC clusters
Export controls touching Huawei / HiSilicon
Netherlands EUV & DUV Lithography Export Control (Sep 2023)
The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs required ASML to obtain export licenses for its deep-ultraviolet (DUV) lithography systems and extended the existing ban on EUV systems. ASML is the sole manufacturer of EUV machines globally; the controls prevent China from acquiring the equipment needed to produce chips at leading-edge nodes. The policy was developed in alignment with U.S. and Japanese export control frameworks.
▲ 12 companies affected
U.S.–Netherlands–Japan Trilateral Chip Equipment Alignment (Jan 2023)
Following extensive diplomatic negotiations, the United States, the Netherlands, and Japan reached an informal multilateral agreement — announced on or around January 27, 2023 — to align their semiconductor equipment export control frameworks. The Netherlands subsequently imposed DUV licensing requirements on ASML (effective September 2023), and Japan expanded its controls to 23 categories of advanced fab equipment (effective July 2023). The trilateral alignment effectively closed the most significant loopholes in restricting China's access to the equipment needed for leading-edge chip production, since restrictions by any single ally could previously be circumvented through the others.
▲ 12 companies affected
U.S. Entity List: SMIC (Dec 2020)
The U.S. Department of Commerce added SMIC — China's largest foundry — to the Entity List on December 18, 2020, citing the risk that equipment and materials supplied to SMIC could be diverted to military end uses. The listing subjects exports of advanced semiconductor manufacturing tools destined for SMIC to a presumption-of-denial license review for items that could enable production at 10nm or below. Existing licenses for mature-node tooling were largely allowed to continue, keeping SMIC operational at 14nm/28nm nodes while freezing its path to sub-10nm leading-edge production.
▲ 9 companies affected
QWho supplies Huawei / HiSilicon?
Huawei / HiSilicon relies on 4 upstream suppliers across the AI chip supply chain.
SMIC (China's largest foundry; capped at 14nm without EUV access; Entity Listed 2020), Arm Holdings (Dominant CPU/NPU IP licensor; virtually all AI chips in mobile, edge, and cloud use Arm instruction set), Cadence (Leading EDA software provider; IC design tools (Virtuoso, Genus, Innovus) used by every advanced chip designer; US export-controlled to Chinese entities since 2022), Synopsys (Largest EDA software provider; IC design and verification tools (Design Compiler, PrimeTime, VCS) essential for all advanced chip tapeouts; US export-controlled to Chinese entities).
QWhat does Huawei / HiSilicon make?
China's leading chip designer (Kirin mobile, Ascend AI); on US Entity List since 2019
Key products Kirin 9000s (5G SoC), Ascend 910 AI accelerator