Huawei founder says USA overestimates its semiconductor prowess

Ren Zhengfei says his company is a generation behind, but he knows Huawei to catch up

Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei has said the USA overestimates his company’s semiconductor design prowess, which is at least a generation behind rival chipmakers.

In a friendly interview with Communist Party organ People’s Daily, Ren was asked about the USA’s recent claim that Huawei’s “Ascend” AI accelerator chips are based on stolen American tech, meaning anyone using them anywhere therefore violates Washington’s export controls and risks legal action.

“There are many chip companies in China, and many of them are doing well,” Ren replied, before adding “Huawei is one of them.”

“The United States has exaggerated Huawei's achievements. Huawei is not that great yet. We need to work hard to live up to their evaluation. Our single chip is still one generation behind the United States.”

The founder didn’t mention which generation he’s referring to. Nvidia’s current flagship is the Blackwell architecture and if Huawei is a generation behind that it and can match the performance of the Hopper platform it can still produce some mighty powerful kit. If Ren thinks Huawei is a generation behind Nvidia’s next-gen Rubin kit, then China already has AI hardware as powerful as anyone’s.

Asked if China faces difficulties trying to match US tech, Ren said cultivating talent is the main obstacle to China developing advanced semiconductors.

However the founder also downplayed the need for chip breakthroughs.

“There is no need to worry about the chip problem,” he said. “Using methods such as superposition and clustering, the calculation results are comparable to the most advanced level. In terms of software, there will be hundreds of open-source software to meet the needs of the entire society in the future.”

Ren also expressed optimism that China’s “Eastern Data, Western Compute” plan, under which computing workloads are moved to China’s renewable-energy-rich west, will work.

For what it’s worth, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology last week issued a “Computing Power Interconnection Action Plan” that calls for “new high-performance transmission protocols to improve the level of network interconnection between computing power nodes” and “cross-subject, cross-architecture and cross-region computing power supply and demand scheduling.”

People’s Daily asked Ren to predict the future of AI and he responded by saying it may be ”the last technological revolution in human society”, with nuclear fusion another candidate. He predicted AI will “take decades or even hundreds of years” and said China’s large population and highly developed power grid are advantages that will mean it is a strong competitor in the field. ®