AIChipMapExport Controls

Huawei / HiSilicon SUPPLY CHAIN TRACE

CHIP DESIGNERS🇨🇳 China

Huawei Technologies and its chip design subsidiary HiSilicon are China's most advanced fabless semiconductor designers, responsible for the Kirin mobile SoC and Ascend AI accelerator families. Placed on the U.S. Entity List in May 2019 and cut off from TSMC in September 2020, Huawei/HiSilicon now relies on SMIC for its most advanced designs, making the SMIC–HiSilicon edge the front line of the U.S.–China technology decoupling in AI and 5G semiconductors.

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UPSTREAM — SUPPLIERS

SMIC

China's largest foundry; capped at 14nm without EUV access; Entity Listed 2020

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FOUNDRIESfabricates Kirin/Ascend chips for

Arm Holdings

Dominant CPU/NPU IP licensor; virtually all AI chips in mobile, edge, and cloud use Arm instruction set

Chokepoint🇬🇧
CHIP IPlicenses CPU/NPU IP to (legacy pre-2020 grandfathered license)

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

Chokepoint🇺🇸
EDA TOOLSprovides EDA tools to (restricted since BIS Entity List 2020)

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

Chokepoint🇺🇸
EDA TOOLSprovides EDA tools to (restricted since BIS Entity List 2020)

↓ all supply to Huawei / HiSilicon ↓

Huawei / HiSilicon

China's leading chip designer (Kirin mobile, Ascend AI); on US Entity List since 2019

UPSTREAM — SUPPLIERS ↑ · DOWNSTREAM — CUSTOMERS ↓
~#1 China AI accelerator (Ascend 910B/C); ~35% China premium smartphone SoC (Kirin)
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↓ Huawei / HiSilicon supplies to ↓

Huawei Cloud

China's third-largest cloud provider; runs Huawei Ascend 910 AI clusters; closed-loop with HiSilicon — only Chinese cloud with end-to-end domestic chip+cloud stack

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CLOUD PROVIDERSsupplies Ascend AI chips to parent cloud division

Alibaba Cloud

China's #1 cloud provider; deploys Alibaba Hanguang 800 AI chip (TSMC-fabbed) and Huawei Ascend; operates Qwen LLM

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CLOUD PROVIDERSsupplies Ascend AI chips to

ByteDance

TikTok/Douyin parent; one of the world's largest AI compute buyers; cut off from NVIDIA H100/H200 by Oct 2023 BIS advanced computing rules

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CLOUD PROVIDERSsupplies Ascend AI chips to

Baidu

China's leading AI pioneer; designs Kunlun AI chips (Samsung-fabbed); operates ERNIE Bot LLM; major AI cloud infrastructure provider

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CLOUD PROVIDERSsupplies Ascend AI chips to

Tencent Cloud

China's #2 cloud provider; major AI GPU buyer pivoting to H20/Huawei Ascend after BIS export controls; operates Hunyuan LLM

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CLOUD PROVIDERSsupplies Ascend AI chips to

DOWNSTREAM — CUSTOMERS

About this company

QWhat is Huawei / HiSilicon's role in the AI chip supply chain?

China's leading chip designer (Kirin mobile, Ascend AI); on US Entity List since 2019

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