Huawei has already ‘built an ecosystem entirely independent of the United States’, according to a senior executive.
South China Morning Post scmp.com Coco Fengin Guangdong
Published: 9:00pm, 29 Aug 2025
China has virtually overcome crippling US tech restrictions, according to a senior executive at Huawei Technologies, as mainland-developed computing infrastructure, AI systems and other software now rival those from the world’s largest economy.
Shenzhen-based Huawei, which was added to Washington’s trade blacklist in May 2019, has already “built an ecosystem entirely independent of the United States”, said Tao Jingwen, president of the firm’s quality, business process and information technology management department, at an event on Wednesday in Guiyang, capital of southwestern Guizhou province.
Tao highlighted the privately held company’s resilience at the event, as he discussed some of the latest milestones in its journey towards tech self-sufficiency.
That industry-wide commitment to tech self-reliance would enable China to “surpass the US in terms of artificial intelligence applications” on the back of the country’s “extensive economy and business scenarios”, he said.
His remarks reflected Huawei’s efforts to surmount tightened US control measures and heightened geopolitical tensions, as the company pushes the boundaries in semiconductors, computing power, cloud services, AI and operating systems.
Tao’s presentation was made on the same day that Huawei said users of token services on its cloud platform had access to its CloudMatrix 384 system, which is a cluster of 384 Ascend AI processors – spread across 12 computing cabinets and four bus cabinets – that delivers 300 petaflops of computing power and 48 terabytes of high-bandwidth memory. A petaflop is 1,000 trillion calculations per second.
South China Morning Post scmp.com Published: 5:00pm, 12 Aug 2025 - Chinese tech firms are leveraging software improvements to compensate for limited access to advanced hardware.
Huawei Technologies has unveiled a software tool designed to accelerate inference in large artificial intelligence models, an advancement that could help China reduce its reliance on expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips.
Unified Cache Manager (UCM) is an algorithm that allocates data according to varying latency requirements across different types of memories – including ultra-fast HBM, standard dynamic random access memory and solid-state drive – thereby enhancing inference efficiency, according to Huawei executives at the Financial AI Reasoning Application Landing and Development Forum in Shanghai on Tuesday.
Zhou Yuefeng, vice-president and head of Huawei’s data storage product line, said UCM demonstrated its effectiveness during tests, reducing inference latency by up to 90 per cent and increasing system throughput as much as 22-fold.
The move exemplifies how Chinese tech firms are leveraging software improvements to compensate for limited access to advanced hardware. Earlier this year, Chinese start-up DeepSeek captured global attention by developing powerful AI models with constrained chip resources.
Huawei plans to open-source UCM in September, first in its online developer community and later to the broader industry. The initiative could help China lessen its dependence on foreign-made HBM chips, a market mostly controlled by South Korea’s SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, as well as the US supplier Micron Technology.
HBM is a stacked, high-speed, low-latency memory that provides substantial data throughput to AI chips, enabling optimal performance. The global HBM market is projected to nearly double in revenue this year, reaching US$34 billion, and is expected to hit US$98 billion by 2030, largely driven by the AI boom, according to consulting firm Yole Group.
scmp.com - The new virtual ID scheme has been in the beta stage since a draft regulation was launched in July last year.
China has officially introduced a controversial national cyber ID system, despite concerns from some experts and netizens over privacy and censorship.
The system aims to “protect the security of citizens’ identity information”, according to regulations that went into effect on Tuesday, backed by the Ministry of Public Security, the Cyberspace Administration of China, and four other authorities.
The app, whose beta version was launched last year, issues an encrypted virtual ID composed of random letters and digits so the person’s real name and ID number are not given to websites when verifying accounts. So far, it is not-mandatory for internet users to apply for the cyber ID.
Starting in 2017, Beijing started ordering online platforms to adopt real-name registration for applications such as instant messaging, microblogs, online forums and other websites that ask netizens to submit their ID numbers. Separately, official ID has been required to register a mobile phone number in China since 2010.
www.scmp.com - Heightened US chip export controls have prompted Chinese AI and chip companies to collaborate.
Chinese chipmaker Sophgo has adapted its compute card to power DeepSeek’s reasoning model, underscoring growing efforts by local firms to develop home-grown artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and reduce dependence on foreign chips amid tightening US export controls.
Sophgo’s SC11 FP300 compute card successfully passed verification, showing stable and effective performance in executing the reasoning tasks of DeepSeek’s R1 model in tests conducted by the China Telecommunication Technology Labs (CTTL), the company said in a statement on Monday.
A compute card is a compact module that integrates a processor, memory and other essential components needed for computing tasks, often used in applications like AI.
CTTL is a research laboratory under the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, an organisation affiliated with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
