Huawei lays final bricks of billion-dollar Shanghai R&D complex

Billed as a city in its own right, center built to advance megacorp's 5G, cloud, and AI tech

Huawei's massive R&D complex in Shanghai is finally built - intended to give the US-sanction-hit Chinese tech giant a boost when it comes to competing with international rivals.

Officially named the Huawei Lianqui Lake R&D Center, the Shanghai Qingpu government says the complex cost more than ¥10 billion (or around $1.4 billion) to construct. The high budget for the project was thanks to the complex's footprint of 1.6 million square meters, which the tech giant deemed necessary to include "a plaza town, urban blocks, hilltop settlements, a forest town, college campuses, urban axis [sic], and a water town."

Shanghai's Qingpu district is home to more than a million people, a tiny fraction of the wider city's near-30 million population.

The Qingpu local government says the Lianqui Lake R&D Center "will become a core node in Huawei's global R&D network, attracting top talent, nurturing cutting-edge technologies and helping Huawei achieve greater breakthroughs in key technological fields such as 5G, cloud computing and artificial intelligence, contributing to the advancement of the global technology industry."

Early reports on the complex in April indicated that it would employ 30k people, who would be tasked with innovating in the aforementioned areas, as well as developing new chipmaking tools. Perhaps most important of these tools are lithography machines, the most cutting-edge of which are more or less necessary for producing chips nodes 7nm or smaller.

The latest extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machines are produced solely by Dutch tech company ASML, which is legally barred from selling the machines to China. Huawei has been able to produce 7nm processors for its smartphones, but not "at scale" according to US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, presumably because using older deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines results in significant amounts of chip defects.

While the official statement on the Huawei Lianqui Lake R&D Center doesn't mention chipmaking tools, there's strong evidence that Huawei and China really covet this technology, as Huawei employs a former ASML worker that was accused of stealing the company's trade secrets.

Should Huawei fail to make much headway into its own cutting-edge chipmaking tools, it could mean China will continue to lag behind Western rivals, with one study predicting China will make just two percent of the world's advanced chips in 2024, compared to the US's 28 percent. ®