At the 2023 World Computing Conference, Huawei Vice President and Rotating Chairman Xu Zhijun admitted that the company’s chips, servers, and PCs are lagging behind foreign products.
According to Gizmochina, for this reason, Huawei’s leader believes that the only way to narrow the gap is to use the company’s own products. Mr. Xu argued that if Huawei does not use in-house chips, the gap will only widen. But if the company uses in-house chips on a large scale, it can pull and accelerate the advancement of its entire technology and products, eventually catching up with foreign companies.
Mr. Xu also pointed out that China’s general computing industry is currently developing in three types of ecosystems. First is X86, second is the Pentium ecosystem, and finally the RISC-V open-source ecosystem. He believes that these three ecosystems will develop in parallel for a long time in the future and it is still too early to say which ecosystem will be the most successful.
In addition, Mr. Xu emphasized the importance of building an independent computing industry ecosystem in China. According to him, this is necessary for sustainable development and it must be built on the basis of available actual chip manufacturing processes. Mr. Xu also said computing infrastructure must be built on ecologically and sustainably sourced computer chips.
The announcement was made by Mr. Xu not long after Huawei introduced the Mate 60 smartphone line with 5G connectivity after a long hiatus. The Mate 60 series uses the Kirin 9000S chip manufactured using 7nm technology, several years slower than its competitors. However, this is an important milestone for Huawei as it marks the company’s return to 5G.
Although the Kirin 9000S chip is not as advanced as its competitors, this is a step in the right direction for Huawei. The company needs to start over and its in-house chip strategy could be the foundation for its growth in the semiconductor industry in the near future.