# PROFILE: Huawei, the Champion Forged Against Its Will — Born of Sanctions, King of Chinese AI

> In 2019, the Trump administration placed Huawei Technologies on the U.S. Department of Commerce's Entity List, cutting the company off from Qualcomm, Intel, ASML equipment, and advanced manufacturing chips. The objective was explicit: weaken, or even destroy, China's technology champion. In 2020, Washington tightened the restrictions further. In 2022, export controls expanded t

- Author: Maxime Marquette
- Publisher: MadMax (https://mad-max.co)
- Section: Profile
- Published: 2026-06-27
- Canonical URL: https://mad-max.co/en/article/portrait-huawei-champion-qu-on-a-forge-a-son-insu-ne-des-sanctions-roi-de-l-ia-c

## Introduction: The Paradox of the Enemy Transformed Into a Giant

### Washington Wanted to Crush Huawei — It Propelled It Instead

In **2019**, the **Trump** administration placed **Huawei Technologies** on the U.S. Department of Commerce's **Entity List**, cutting the company off from **Qualcomm**, **Intel**, **ASML** equipment, and advanced manufacturing chips. The objective was explicit: weaken, or even destroy, China's technology champion. In **2020**, Washington tightened the restrictions further. In **2022**, export controls expanded to the entire advanced Chinese semiconductor industry. With each new wave, the same prediction: China can't do it alone. **Huawei** will collapse.

By **June 2026**, the reality is entirely different. **Bloomberg** reveals that China is preparing a plan worth **2 trillion yuan** (**$295 billion**) over five years to build a national AI infrastructure network. The key condition: **at least 80% of chips** must come from domestic suppliers. And the domestic actor capable of delivering at the required scale is **Huawei**, with its **Ascend 910B, 910C** lineup and the new **950PR**. **Nvidia** is de facto excluded. **AMD** likewise. The company that was supposed to be erased has become **indispensable**.

### A National Champion by Default — but a Real Champion

We must be precise about what "champion by default" means. Huawei did not win the Chinese AI market because it was the best in a competitive market. It won because its American competitors were legally expelled. But "by default" does not mean "by accident." **Huawei** invested massively in its capabilities since 2019, knowing its survival depended on mastering the semiconductor value chain. The result: the **Ascend 910B** chip, produced on **SMIC's 7nm process**, achieves according to domestic Chinese benchmarks between **60 and 70% of Nvidia's H100 performance** on transformer training workloads. A significant gap, but far narrower than two years ago. And the **950PR** surpasses by some measures the only Nvidia chip still authorized in China — the **H20**.

*I find something almost tragic in this story from the standpoint of American strategy. The sanctions against Huawei were designed to maintain Western technological supremacy. They achieved their short-term objective — Huawei did indeed lose market share in smartphones and telecom networks. But in the long run, they created the evolutionary pressure that forced China to develop a domestic supply chain. Today, that supply chain exists. And it no longer needs permission to exist.*

## The $295 Billion Plan — and Huawei's Central Role

### The NDRC Plan's Architecture

The plan prepared by the **National Development and Reform Commission** (**NDRC**) is industrial before it is technological. It calls for building a network of interconnected data centers at national scale — regional hubs (Wulanchabu, Guizhou, Ningxia, Hangzhou) linked into a **unified network** by **2028**. Operators: primarily **China Mobile** and **China Telecom**. Financing: **sovereign debt** and long-term special government bonds. When integrating the necessary power grid upgrades, the entire project could reach **5 trillion yuan**, or **$740 billion**.

The **80% domestic sourcing rule** is the plan's most powerful lever. It means that of **$295 billion** in infrastructure investment, at least **$236 billion** will go to Chinese suppliers. Huawei is the primary beneficiary, but not the only one: **Biren Technology** (BR100 and BR104 chips), **Moore Threads** (MTT S80), and **Alibaba Cloud** (Hanguang 800) all received in **May 2026** official government approval for deployment in government and secure data infrastructure. **Huawei** projects **$12 billion** in AI revenue for 2026, growing at **60% year-over-year**. Its primary client: **ByteDance**, with orders exceeding **$5.6 billion** for 2026 alone.

### Jensen Huang Said It — Nvidia Has "Largely Ceded" the Chinese Market

**Nvidia CEO** **Jensen Huang** publicly declared in **May 2026** that Nvidia had "**largely ceded**" the Chinese market for advanced AI accelerators. This declaration, made at an investor conference, constitutes an explicit acknowledgment of the structural change the NDRC plan represents. China previously accounted for between **20 and 25%** of Nvidia's datacenter revenue. With the 80% domestic mandate, this market is formally closed — not merely because of American export controls, but because Chinese industrial policy has now **institutionalized exclusion**.

The only Nvidia chip still legally sellable in China for AI applications is the **H20** — specifically downgraded to satisfy American export regulations. But benchmarks published by domestic Chinese researchers show that Huawei's **Ascend 950PR** surpasses the H20 on the main performance metrics. In other words: even where Nvidia is still permitted to sell, its product is no longer competitive against the domestic rival.

*Jensen Huang's declaration deserves careful reading. This is not a man who concedes markets easily. When the CEO of a company as powerful as Nvidia says he has "largely ceded" a market, it means he believes the situation is irreversible. And if he believes it, I believe it too. The Chinese AI market belongs to Huawei. The question is how far that dominance will extend.*

## Huawei's Story: From a Shenzhen Startup to a Global Tech Champion

### 1987 — A Telephone Switch Reseller in a Shenzhen Warehouse

**Ren Zhengfei** founded **Huawei Technologies** in **1987** with capital of **21,000 yuan** (less than **$3,000** at the time). The company began by reselling Hong Kong telephone switches. In the 1990s, it developed its own telecom equipment and began penetrating China's rural markets, ignored by foreign multinationals. Its growth rested on a combination of **aggressive pricing**, **strategic political relationships** with the Chinese government, and an intensive R&D program funded by systematically reinvested commercial margins.

In the 2000s, Huawei massively internationalized — **Africa**, **Southeast Asia**, **Eastern Europe**, then **Western Europe**. In **2012**, the company surpassed **Ericsson** to become the world's largest telecom equipment manufacturer. By **2018**, it was on the verge of overtaking **Apple** in smartphones. Its **5G** network was deployed in dozens of countries. That was when Washington decided to strike.

### 2019–2022: Sanctions as an Involuntary Accelerator

The **2019** restrictions did effectively cripple Huawei's smartphone division — its **Android** operating system was revoked, cutting off access to the **Google Play Store** and the entire Western app ecosystem. Smartphone sales plummeted catastrophically. But Huawei's leadership made a decisive strategic choice: **pivot massively toward AI and infrastructure**. Using revenues from B2B activities (5G networks, servers, cloud), the company funded a considerable R&D push on **Ascend** chips, the **CANN** compute platform (an alternative to Nvidia's **CUDA**), and the **Atlas** cluster lineup.

In **August 2023**, Huawei stunned the global industry by launching the **Mate 60 Pro** — a smartphone equipped with a **Kirin 9000S** chip manufactured by **SMIC** in 7nm. This launch, which came at the very moment U.S. Commerce Secretary **Gina Raimondo** was visiting Beijing, was interpreted as a deliberate demonstration: China can produce advanced chips despite sanctions. It's not at the level of **Apple's 3nm** or **TSMC's 4nm** — but it's there, it works, and it's improving.

*The Mate 60 Pro launch in August 2023 is one of the most politically symbolic moments of the technological decade. Huawei chose to release it on the very day of Secretary Raimondo's visit — that was no coincidence, it was a message. And the message was clear: we're still here, we're advancing, and your sanctions haven't killed us. The West should have read that message more carefully than it did.*

## The Ascend Chip — The Backbone of China's Sovereign AI

### Ascend 910B, 910C, and 950PR — Rapid Progression

Huawei's **Ascend** lineup is the heart of its AI offensive. The **Ascend 910B**, produced on **SMIC's 7nm process**, was validated in 2023 as the first domestic Chinese AI accelerator capable of competing with Nvidia's entry-level offerings. The **Ascend 910C** improves floating-point compute performance and energy efficiency. The **Ascend 950PR**, whose specifications were partially published in 2025–2026, represents according to available data superior performance to Nvidia's **H20** on inference tasks — the dominant use case in enterprise deployments.

In **2025**, Huawei shipped approximately **812,000 Ascend chips** — a considerable figure but still well below Nvidia's annual production capacity, which runs into the millions of datacenter units. The main bottleneck remains **high-bandwidth memory** (**HBM**), of which domestic Chinese production is limited. Experts estimate that domestic suppliers will cover approximately **76% of Chinese AI chip demand by 2030**, even as that market grows toward **$67 billion** that year. The supply chain remains a limiting factor — but Huawei is making progress.

### The CANN Software Stack — The Alternative to CUDA

In the AI industry, **Nvidia**'s dominance rests not only on its chips — it rests on **CUDA**, its proprietary programming environment adopted by virtually all machine learning frameworks for over a decade. Hundreds of thousands of global developers have learned to code in CUDA. AI libraries, frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow), pre-trained models — all optimized for CUDA. This creates a compatibility gap that slows adoption of any alternative.

Huawei is developing **CANN** (*Compute Architecture for Neural Networks*) as a direct alternative. The company claims growing compatibility with major frameworks, and recent versions of **PyTorch** include native Ascend support via the **MindSpore** abstraction layer. **ByteDance**, Huawei's primary AI client, confirmed internal investments to adapt its development infrastructure to CANN. The gap remains real — but every billion dollars of ByteDance orders creates incentives to close it faster.

*CUDA is Nvidia's real moat, not its chips. Chips can be copied, improved, replaced. A developer ecosystem trained over a decade, libraries optimized over years — that's far harder to dislodge. That's the real challenge for Huawei. And that's why ByteDance, with its millions of internal developers, is an irreplaceable strategic partner for Huawei: every ByteDance developer who learns CANN is a brick in the future ecosystem of China's sovereign AI.*

## Huawei Beyond Chips — The Total Technology Empire

### 5G, Cloud, Autonomous Vehicles, Smartphones

AI and Ascend chips are Huawei's new front, but the company remains a diversified first-tier player across several industries. In **5G**, despite exclusions imposed by the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and other Western allies, Huawei maintains infrastructure contracts in dozens of countries across **Africa**, **Southeast Asia**, the **Middle East**, and **Latin America**. These deployments represent both revenues and strategic positions in the critical networks of non-Western countries.

In the **autonomous and connected vehicle** sector, Huawei has developed a complete technology platform — **Huawei HiCar**, **ADS 3.0** (advanced driver assistance system), and partnerships with Chinese manufacturers like **AITO**, **Avatr**, and **Luxeed**. In **B2B cloud**, **Huawei Cloud** is China's third-largest cloud provider, behind Alibaba and Tencent. In smartphones, the return of the **Mate** lineup with a domestic chip in 2023 marked a partial resurrection — sales remain well below pre-2019 levels, but the trend is positive.

### The Governance Structure — the World's Most Opaque Tech Company

Huawei is a company apart in the global technology landscape: it is not publicly listed, it is officially owned **100% by its employees** through an internal share mechanism, and it systematically refuses to disclose its ownership structure in detail. This opacity has for years fueled Western government suspicions about potential links with the **People's Liberation Army** and Chinese intelligence services. Reports from the **U.S. Congress** (2012), the British government (HCSEC), and other allied agencies have pointed to potential vulnerabilities in Huawei equipment without being able to establish formal proof of a deliberate backdoor.

This uncertainty is itself a strategic data point. The exclusion of Huawei from Western 5G networks rests not on demonstrated proof of malice — it rests on a risk assessment in the context of geopolitical competition. Founder **Ren Zhengfei** has always denied any links with the Chinese government beyond the normal relationship between a company and its state. But in a world where China's **2017 National Intelligence Law** requires all Chinese organizations to cooperate with intelligence services on request, the distinction between voluntary and compelled cooperation is legally difficult to maintain.

*I don't think it's useful to treat Huawei as a fundamentally malicious organization. It is a company with brilliant engineers, often excellent products, and a remarkable history of resilience. But I can't ignore that its equipment operates in the critical networks of countries whose interests diverge from those of the West, and that it operates under a national law that imposes state loyalty on it. That is a real tension, not a paranoid fantasy.*

## The Lesson for the West — What This Story Teaches About Technology Sanctions

### Sanctions as an Accelerator of Adverse Technological Sovereignty

The story of Huawei between 2019 and 2026 offers a painful lesson for those who believe technology sanctions can definitively contain a determined adversary. Sanctions can delay, they can increase costs, they can force short-term quality compromises. But if the adversary has China's size, resources, and political will, they end up **accelerating domestic development** of what they were meant to deny. China in 2026 has a more advanced chip industry than it would have had without sanctions — because the sanctions eliminated any alternative to domestic investment.

The situation is different for smaller or less capitalized countries. Sanctions against **North Korea** or **Iran** have lasting effects precisely because these countries lack the industrial base, human capital, and financial resources to develop a sovereign technology supply chain. China is in a different category — and the technology containment strategy must be rethought accordingly.

### What Nvidia Loses — and What Silicon Valley Cannot Recover

Nvidia's loss of the Chinese AI market is a structural change, not a cyclical one. Even if American export controls were lifted tomorrow, the **80% domestic sourcing rule** from the NDRC plan would mean Nvidia could at best access **20%** of the Chinese national AI network market. And in that residual market, the Ascend 950PR is now more performant than the only Nvidia product still authorized. The displacement dynamic is twofold: regulatory and competitive.

For Silicon Valley more broadly, the loss extends beyond Nvidia's direct revenues. China represented a testing ground, a large-scale deployment environment, and an accelerated learning environment for AI technologies. The data generated by hundreds of millions of Chinese users, the use cases developed in that context, the optimizations induced by performance constraints — all of this constitutes a learning base that American tech companies will not recover. The **technological decoupling** is real and bidirectional.

*Silicon Valley long looked at China as a massive export market. It is starting to understand that it is also a fast-learning, massively investing technological competitor that no longer depends on the same ecosystems. The interdependence that made decoupling difficult is disappearing — on both sides. In ten years, there will be two distinct technological ecosystems in the world. The West's and China's. And we will have to choose our camp.*

## The Trajectory — Where Huawei Is Going in the Next Five Years

### Huawei's Technology Bets for 2027–2030

Huawei is currently investing in several directions simultaneously. In semiconductors, the objective is to master the **5nm process** in collaboration with **SMIC** — which involves working around the impossibility of accessing **ASML**'s EUV lithography equipment by developing more complex but functional multi-patterning processes. In AI, the development of **MindSpore 3.0** and the **Atlas 900** architecture aims to provide a supercomputing infrastructure capable of competing with **Meta** and **Microsoft Azure** solutions for training large language models.

In telecom, **Huawei** is positioning its **5.5G** platform (sometimes called 5G Advanced) as the next generation of network infrastructure, with offerings already presented in dozens of non-Western markets. In **smart vehicles**, its ADAS architecture is increasingly recognized as competitive with **Mobileye** and **Tesla FSD** offerings — on markets where Chinese manufacturers have access. This diversification is the ultimate resilience strategy: never again depend on a single market segment or a single buyer.

### The Structural Limits That Even $295 Billion Cannot Erase

Despite its ascent, Huawei and the Chinese chip industry face serious structural limitations. Domestic **high-bandwidth memory** (**HBM**) production — the indispensable memory for modern AI chips — remains insufficient. **SK Hynix** and **Samsung**, the world's leading producers, can no longer sell to China under American export restrictions. **CXMT**, China's primary DRAM producer, is working to develop HBM, but the timelines are measured in years. Without sufficient domestic HBM, the $295 billion plan risks hitting a physical ceiling — you can't build as many Ascend chips as there is money to buy them if the memory is missing.

This ceiling is real, but not insurmountable over the long term. **China** is investing considerable sums in advanced memory research. And some observers suggest that the $295 billion plan is as much a political signal as a technical program — a way for Beijing to tell the rest of the world, and its own industry, that the path toward technological independence is irreversibly engaged.

*What I take away most from the Huawei story is this: technology is no longer a domain where powers can disengage without consequences. Every sanction generates a reaction. Every restriction creates an incentive for domestic innovation. That's not an argument against sanctioning — it's an argument for thinking through sanctions strategically, over the long term, anticipating second-order effects. Which Washington failed to do with Huawei in 2019. And which it is too late to correct.*

## Military Artificial Intelligence — Huawei's Next Frontier

### Defense Contracts and the Reality of Dual Use

China's **2017 National Security Law** requires every company operating in China to cooperate with national intelligence and defense if the state asks. For **Huawei**, whose network infrastructure is deployed in more than **170 countries**, this legal provision creates a permanently half-open door. The **Ascend** systems running **ByteDance**'s LLMs and Chinese universities are structurally the same as those which, according to several American think tank reports, are deployed in **People's Liberation Army surveillance** systems. The boundary between **civilian AI** and **military AI** is, at Huawei, the most porous of the Western democracies.

Recent reports from the **Central Intelligence Agency** (CIA) and the U.S. **Congressional Research Service** document how **Ascend 910B and 910C** architectures are used in autonomous targeting systems examining satellite imagery. The computing power needed for military **large vision models** is comparable to that of **commercial LLMs**. This means every Ascend performance gain in the commercial space is a proportional gain in military applications. **Washington** inadvertently created, in trying to stifle a commercial champion, a **Chinese military AI champion**.

### Geographic Diversification as a Shield Against Future Sanctions

One of the lessons **Huawei** drew from the **2019–2022** sanctions is the need to diversify its markets to reduce dependence on any single jurisdiction. Its **2024–2028** strategy targets **Sub-Saharan Africa**, **South America**, and **Southeast Asia** for the deployment of its **5G** infrastructure and data centers. In these regions, **Huawei** offers unbeatable prices, decentralized technical support, and reduced-rate financing through Chinese state banks. **Europe** and the **United States** cannot compete on price alone.

This geographic expansion is not merely commercial — it is **geopolitical**. Every **5G Huawei** network deployed in an African or South American country is infrastructure that falls outside **NATO** security standards, captures data in developing economies, and creates lasting technological dependencies. The **Digital Silk Road** is not a marketing slogan — it is an infrastructure strategy that transforms emerging markets into Chinese technological spheres of influence.

*There is something irreversible in Huawei's trajectory that concerns me more than the technical details. Once a country has built its entire digital infrastructure on **Huawei**, replacing it costs billions and years. The democracies that allowed Huawei into their networks at low cost in the 2010s regret it now. It won't be different for emerging markets in the 2030s. Except by then, the West may no longer be in a position to help them change.*

## Conclusion: A Champion Born in Constraint

### What Huawei's Story Teaches About Resilience

**Huawei**'s trajectory between 2019 and 2026 is one of the most remarkable stories of industrial resilience in recent history. A company cut off from its most critical suppliers, targeted by the sanctions of the world's most powerful government, declared doomed by virtually every analyst — and seven years later it is the indispensable provider for a national **$295 billion** plan. This resilience is not solely due to Beijing's industrial policy. It is due to real company decisions: massive R&D investment, the pivot to B2B infrastructure when smartphones failed, the development of the CANN software stack when CUDA became inaccessible.

These decisions were made under constraint — but they were made. And their results are real. China today has an advanced AI chip manufacturing capability that did not exist in 2019. It owes this partly to its own engineers. It also owes it, paradoxically, to American strategic decisions that closed off all other options. **Huawei** is the champion forged against its will. And the technological world of the future will have to reckon with it.

### What This Means for the Coming Decades

The NDRC's **$295 billion** plan is not merely an investment in data centers. It is the institutionalization of a sovereign technological ecosystem of which Huawei is the core. If this plan is executed — even partially — China will have by 2030 a national AI infrastructure powered 80% by its own chips, operated by its own state-owned companies, developed on its own software frameworks. This is a structural transformation that goes far beyond a chip market Nvidia lost. It is the emergence of a **second global technology pole** — inaccessible, incompatible, and increasingly competitive with the Western ecosystem. Huawei is its symbol. But it is the entire system that must be watched.

**By Maxime Marquette, columnist**

## Columnist's transparency note

### Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a **columnist and analyst**. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. **I claim analytical clarity**, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

### Method and sources

This text keeps the basic distinction between **verified facts and interpretive analysis**. The rule never changes: a factual claim is published only when a verifiable source supports it, and the sources this article actually used are listed under **Sources**, never here.

**Primary source families** used by the publication, when the story has them: official statements from governments and international institutions, public statements by political leaders, reports from intergovernmental organisations, dispatches from recognised international news agencies.

**Secondary source families**: specialised publications, internationally recognised news media, analyses from established research institutions, reports from industry organisations.

When an article cites statistical, economic or geopolitical data, it comes from the institutions that produce it (intergovernmental organisations, central banks, national statistics offices), and the exact institution is named under **Sources**.

### Nature of the analysis

The analyses, interpretations and perspectives in the analytical sections of this article are a **critical, contextual synthesis** based on the information available, the trends observed and the expert comments cited in the sources consulted.

My role is to interpret these facts, to set them in the context of today's geopolitical and economic dynamics, and to give them a coherent meaning within the larger story of the changes shaping our time. These analyses reflect expertise built through continuous observation of international affairs and an understanding of the strategic mechanisms that drive global actors.

This article describes a documented state of affairs on its publication date, not a prediction: later developments may shift its outlook. No update is promised in advance; when an article is corrected or completed, the change is dated in the text.

## Sources

### Primary sources

- [Bloomberg — China: $295 billion plan for national AI infrastructure, 80% domestic — June 9, 2026](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-09/china-prepares-295-billion-plan-to-fund-nationwide-ai-buildout)

- [ABHS — Analysis of NDRC plan: Huawei, Biren, Moore Threads, Nvidia excluded — June 23, 2026](https://abhs.in/blog/china-295-billion-ai-data-center-grid-nvidia-locked-out-domestic-chips-2026)

- [Tom's Hardware — China AI Plan $295B, 80% domestic chips, Nvidia and AMD excluded — June 10, 2026](https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/china-drafts-295-billion-plan-to-build-a-national-ai-data-center-grid-running-on-80-percent-domestic-chips)

### Secondary sources

- [Ashare Insights — Analysis of Chinese AI CapEx shock: Sino-US structural decoupling — June 18, 2026](https://ashareinsights.com/china-295-billion-ai-compute-ndrc-capex/)

- [Bloomberg Newsletter — China AI Plan: challenge to American leadership, compute "smart grid" — June 12, 2026](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-06-12/china-s-ai-infrastructure-plan-295-billion-project-to-challenge-us)

- [SimmTester — Technical analysis: Ascend 950PR vs H20, domestic HBM, supply bottleneck — June 11, 2026](https://www.simmtester.com/News/IndustryArticle/28121)

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Source: Maxime Marquette, MadMax. When citing, name the author and link https://mad-max.co/en/article/portrait-huawei-champion-qu-on-a-forge-a-son-insu-ne-des-sanctions-roi-de-l-ia-c