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Business|A Look Inside Huawei’s Phone Shows How China’s Chip Advance Has Stalled
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/business/huawei-phone-chips-china.html
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An analysis of Huawei’s latest series of smartphones, the Mate 70, found chips that showed little progress from those used in last year’s devices.
Dec. 17, 2024, 11:03 a.m. ET
In the tense geopolitical rivalry between China and the United States for control of advanced technology, Huawei is often in the middle.
The Chinese telecommunications giant is a main target of a U.S. trade blacklist and other controls intended to keep Chinese companies from buying or making advanced computer chips. Officials in Washington say these tiny chips, used to power chatbots and smartphones, are also essential for China’s efforts to build its military might.
Huawei is determined to prove that Washington’s trade barriers cannot hold it back. Last year, the company released a line of smartphones, the Mate 60, with chips more advanced than any previously made in China.
But Huawei’s new series of phones, the Mate 70, released last month, indicates that the company has made little progress toward more advanced chips in the past year, according to a new analysis. The chips inside Huawei’s latest devices appear to have been made using the same manufacturing processes as the ones in last year’s phones, said Alexandra Noguera, an analyst at TechInsights, a Canadian research firm.
Ms. Noguera and her colleagues examined the chips inside two models of the Mate 70 series and concluded that they were made by China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, known as SMIC.
The analysts compared the chips with others made by SMIC, including those in Huawei’s breakthrough Mate 60 phone. “Every dimension fits exactly what we have seen for the past two years,” Ms. Noguera said.
