Huawei

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US suspects TSMC helped Huawei skirt export controls, report says

5G, AI chips, Apple, Artificial Intelligence, china tariffs, Chips Act, Export controls, Huawei, NVIDIA, Policy, qualcomm, semiconductors, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, TSMC / /

In April, TSMC was provided with $6.6 billion in direct CHIPS Act funding to “support TSMC’s investment of more than $65 billion in three greenfield leading-edge fabs in Phoenix, Arizona, which will manufacture the world’s most advanced semiconductors,” the Department of Commerce said.

These investments are key to the Biden-Harris administration’s mission of strengthening “economic and national security by providing a reliable domestic supply of the chips that will underpin the future economy, powering the AI boom and other fast-growing industries like consumer electronics, automotive, Internet of Things, and high-performance computing,” the department noted. And in particular, the funding will help America “maintain our competitive edge” in artificial intelligence, the department said.

It likely wouldn’t make sense to prop TSMC up to help the US “onshore the critical hardware manufacturing capabilities that underpin AI’s deep language learning algorithms and inferencing techniques,” to then limit access to US-made tech. TSMC’s Arizona fabs are supposed to support companies like Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm and enable them to “compete effectively,” the Department of Commerce said.

Currently, it’s unclear where the US probe into TSMC will go or whether a damaging finding could potentially impact TSMC’s CHIPS funding.

Last fall, the Department of Commerce published a final rule, though, designed to “prevent CHIPS funds from being used to directly or indirectly benefit foreign countries of concern,” such as China.

If the US suspected that TSMC was aiding Huawei’s AI chip manufacturing, the company could be perceived as avoiding CHIPS guardrails prohibiting TSMC from “knowingly engaging in any joint research or technology licensing effort with a foreign entity of concern that relates to a technology or product that raises national security concerns.”

Violating this “technology clawback” provision of the final rule risks “the full amount” of CHIPS Act funding being “recovered” by the Department of Commerce. That outcome seems unlikely, though, given that TSMC has been awarded more funding than any other recipient apart from Intel.

The Department of Commerce declined Ars’ request to comment on whether TSMC’s CHIPS Act funding could be impacted by their reported probe.

US suspects TSMC helped Huawei skirt export controls, report says Read More »

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Huawei’s $2,800 trifold phone is a real thing it wants people to hold and use

china, folding phones, Huawei, huawei mate xt, Tech, tiangong, tri-fold / /

Weird flex, but ok —

“It’s a piece of work that everyone has thought of but never managed to create.”

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Shot of a red phone that folds into three, against a black background

Enlarge / In the U.S., a folding phone has you carrying around nearly $2,000 of fragile, folding OLED phone. In China and export-friendly countries, the Mate XT adds $1,000 and yet another hinge.

Huawei

Huawei’s Mate XT Ultimate is a phone that does not flip or fold, at least in the way of its Samsung or Google contemporaries. You could say it collapses, really, across two hinges, from a full 10.2-inch diagonal rectangle (about a half-inch short of a standard iPad) down to a traditional 6.4-inch rectangle phone slab. There’s also an in-between single-fold configuration at 7.9 inches. And there’s an optional folding keyboard.

This phone, which Huawei calls a “trifold,” would cost you the USD equivalent of $2,800 (19,999 yuan) if you could buy it in the US. Most notably, the phone launched just hours after Apple’s iPhone 16 event. As noted by The New York Times, Huawei’s product launches are often timed for maximum pushback against the US, which has sanctioned and attempted to stymie Huawei’s chip tech.

“It’s a piece of work that everyone has thought of but never managed to create,” Richard Yu, Huawei’s consumer group chairman, said during the Mate XT livestream unveiling. “I have always had a dream to put our tablet in my pocket, and we did it.”

  • The Mate XT looks incredibly thin on all three panels. You can seemingly unfold the whole thing, or do just two panels.

    Huawei

  • If you can afford the $2,800 Mate XT, a first-generation trifold phone, you can survive every one of your holdings being in the red today.

  • Alternately, you can afford the Mate XT because you are at an “investing in art” level of wealth.

    Huawei

  • As a folded-up phone, the Mate XT looks rather normal. The circular camera bump gives off early-2000s point-and-shoot digicam vibes.

    Huawei

  • A shot of the Mate XT from Huawei’s promotional trailer, folded up.

    Huawei

  • Another look at the folding style, this one on white.

    Huawei

For the price of two really good gaming PCs, you get 256GB storage (with pricier upgrades available), 16GB RAM, a 5,600 mAh battery, a 50-megapixel main camera, and two 12 MP ultrawide and periscope cameras. It weights 298 grams, is just 3.6 mm thick when unfolded, and its screen is an LTPO OLED with 120 Hz refresh. There are, just like US flagship phones, a lot of AI-powered promises stuck onto the software and camera.

The

The “Tiangong” hinge system inside the Mate XT Ultimate.

Huawei

Beyond the price, the size, and the AI promises, the Mate XT Ultimate will be most interesting in how its hinges hold up. Huawei named its hinges after the Tiangong space station and says it allows for “internal and external bending” across dual tracks. It is made of a composite laminate and non-Newtonian fluid bits.

The Verge notes that the Mate XT Ultimate has seen some 3.7 million pre-orders through Chinese retailer Vmall—before a price was announced. It does not seem likely that the phone will be released outside China.

Huawei’s $2,800 trifold phone is a real thing it wants people to hold and use Read More »

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Intel’s and Qualcomm’s Huawei export licenses get revoked

Huawei, qualcomm, Tech / /

More Arm laptops? —

Huawei’s phone division has moved on, but laptops will suffer without Intel.

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Huawei's Intel-powered Matebook X Pro has drawn criticism from US China hawks.

Enlarge / Huawei’s Intel-powered Matebook X Pro has drawn criticism from US China hawks.

Huawei

The US crackdown on exports to Huawei now includes even stronger restrictions than the company has already faced. The Financial Times reports that Intel and Qualcomm have had their Huawei export licenses revoked, so Huawei will no longer be able to buy chips from either company.

The export ban has been around since 2020 and means that any company wishing to ship parts to Huawei must get approval from the government on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes these come with restrictions, like Qualcomm’s license, which allowed it to ship smartphone chips to Huawei, but not “5G” chips. That led to Qualcomm creating special 4G-only versions of its 5G chips for Huawei, and the company ended up with 4G-only Snapdragon 888 phones in 2021.

Since then, Huawei has been working on its own Arm chips from its chip design division, HiSilicon. In April, the Huawei Pura 70 smartphone launched with an in-house HiSilicon Kirin 9010 SoC made at SMIC, a Chinese chip fab that is also facing export restrictions. With what is probably still a 7 nm manufacturing process, it’s more of a 2020 chip than a 2024 chip, but that’s still fast enough for many use cases.

Assuming HiSilicon can make enough smartphone chips, the loss of Qualcomm chips isn’t a huge deal right now. Qualcomm seemed to know Huawei has moved beyond it, too, saying in a recent SEC filing, “We do not expect to receive product revenues from Huawei beyond the current calendar year.” Huawei is roaring back to life in the Chinese smartphone market, thanks to HiSilicon chips and preferences for locally made goods.

Huawei's new laptop looks thin, light, and premium.

Huawei’s new laptop looks thin, light, and premium.

Huawei

Intel is going to be a bigger problem and was probably the reason for this latest export change. Intel has controversially had a license to ship Huawei laptop chips since 2020, so Huawei’s laptop business hasn’t been hurting much. Just in April, the 2024 Huawei Matebook X Pro launched with Intel’s latest “Meteor Lake” Core Ultra 9 Processor. It looks like a top-tier laptop, with a 14-inch,120 Hz OLED display, fingerprint reader, all the latest Wi-Fi connectivity, Windows 11 (Microsoft also has approval), and an aluminum body. Thanks to the Intel chip, it also has much-hyped “on-board AI processing.”

Shortly after launch, Reuters reported that Republican lawmakers were unhappy about Intel’s involvement with Huawei’s premium laptop, particularly because of its ability to enable nebulous “AI” features. The US recently passed new restrictions on shipping AI chips to China, but that was around more serious Nvidia AI server chips like the H200, which powers most of the generative AI industry. The hype around AI also means most consumer gear comes with some kind of “AI” marketing angle nowadays, and apparently that was enough to send lawmakers back to the drawing board.

If it feels like you’ve heard of a thousand Huawei export ban expansions that don’t seem very effective, you’re not alone. That Reuters report quotes Congressman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) with the same feeling: “These approvals must stop. Two years ago, I was told licenses to Huawei would stop. Today, it doesn’t seem as though the policy has changed.” The policy has changed, like when new licenses stopped being issued in 2023, but that apparently didn’t involve revoking existing licenses. Profit-first US companies are fighting these bans every step of the way, since a Huawei contract can represent millions of dollars. Huawei can also see all of this coming and is doing its best to adjust.

Assuming this latest restriction finally does the trick, with no Intel chips, Huawei’s laptop business will surely suffer once it runs out of its current stockpile. With ARM laptops becoming more and more popular, though, maybe the next step for Huawei’s laptop division is a HiSilicon laptop. Such a laptop would probably be very slow, but it would be better than nothing.

Intel’s and Qualcomm’s Huawei export licenses get revoked Read More »

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Smartphone manufacturers still want to make foldables a thing

Foldables, Huawei, samsung, syndication, Tech / /
Huawei MateX 5

Enlarge / A Huawei Technologies Co. Mate X5 smartphone arranged in Hong Kong, China, on Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023.

Every large smartphone maker except Apple is betting that “foldable” phones will help revive a lackluster mobile market, despite the devices still largely failing to attract mainstream consumers.

Foldables, which have a screen that opens like a book or compact mirror, barely exceed a 1 per cent market share of all smartphones sold globally almost five years after they were first introduced.

But Samsung has doubled down on the product, investing heavily in marketing this year. In July, the Korean group released its 5G Galaxy Z series.

The world’s largest smartphone manufacturer points to estimates from Counterpoint Research that foldable devices may surpass a third of all smartphones costing more than $600 by 2027.

“We will continue to position our foldables as a key engine for our flagship growth with the clear differentiation, experience and flexibility these devices have to offer,” said Samsung.

Other handset makers such as Motorola, China’s Huawei and its spin-off Honor are also pinning their hopes on the product helping to revive a market that suffered its worst year for more than a decade.

“This is the year people [in the industry] really dived in,” said Ben Wood, an analyst at CCS Insight. “Everybody now is betting on this, except Apple.”

The iPhone-maker has yet to show any interest in the category, though patent filings suggest it may one day introduce an iPad that folds in half. Every other big smartphone maker has followed Samsung into the market, including Google’s Pixel Fold and Chinese alternatives from Huawei, Oppo and Xiaomi.

“We believe foldables are the future of smartphone devices, just like electric cars were to the auto industry,” said Bond Zhang, UK chief executive of Honor. “We’re approaching a crucial tipping point where foldables may soon become mainstream.”

But market data shows foldables are still far from mainstream. Counterpoint Research estimates about 16 million foldable phones will be sold this year, just 1.3 per cent of the 1.2 billion smartphone market total. Analysts say consumers are deterred by concerns about price, reliability and utility.

“I do wonder if there are too many products chasing too little market share at the moment,” Wood said.

Smartphone manufacturers still want to make foldables a thing Read More »

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China’s Largest Telecom Forms Metaverse Industry Alliance, Including Xiaomi, Huawei, HTC & Unity

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China Mobile, that country’s largest wireless carier with over 940 million subscribers, has formed a metaverse industry alliance including some of the biggest names in China-based tech.

As reported by Shanghai Securities News (Chinese), China Mobile announced during Mobile World Congress Shanghai what it calls the ‘China Mobile Metaverse Industry Alliance’, something the company says will be “the world’s strongest metaverse circle of friends.”

At MWC Shanghai, state-owned China Mobile announced the first batch of 24 members of the alliance, including Huawei, Xiaomi, HTC Vive, Unity China, NOLO, XREAL (formerly Nreal), AI company iFlytek, video streaming platform MGTV, and cloud streaming platform Haima Cloud.

Image courtesy China Mobile

Main objectives include improving the state of metaverse development in China, sharing resources to deepen cooperation between the companies, and developing a “win-win concept” to share the new dividends of the digital economy. China Mobile additionally announced a member alliance fund that will support outstanding metaverse projects as well as R&D for both hardware and XR content creation.

At the MWC Shanghai press conference, Zhao Dachun, deputy general manager of China Mobile, said that the metaverse represents a new opportunity for trillions of yuan (hundreds of billions of USD) and “an important carrier to accelerate the construction of digital China and realize the digital economy.”

China Mobile isn’t new to the space. In 2018, China Mobile partnered with HTC to “accelerate the proliferation of 5G infrastructure and devices in China” and provide HTC with greater push to get its VR devices into more retail channels.

In 2021, the company launched its own XR interoperability standard called GSXR (General Standard for XR), which included support from many of the companies listed above in addition to Pico, Rokid, Oppo, Baidu, Tencent, China Telecom, and Skyworth.

Migu, China Mobile’s streaming content subsidiary, has also recently built a new ‘Metaverse Headquarters’ in Xiamen, China. There, the company says it will leverage 5G and XR technologies to help build Xiamen into “high-quality, high-value, modern and international” city with digital intelligence, China Daily reports.

China’s Largest Telecom Forms Metaverse Industry Alliance, Including Xiaomi, Huawei, HTC & Unity Read More »

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Huawei CFO officially off the hook from US fraud charges

Highlights, Huawei, News / /

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Huawei CFO officially off the hook from US fraud charges Read More »