GoKawiilThe plot thickens in the great AI chip race.
Tingbo He, president of Huawei’s chip-design subsidiary HiSilicon, says her company’s engineers have developed a novel way to optimize semiconductors—and she believes it will close the performance gap between Chinese and Western chips over the next few years.
Huawei’s method, in short, focuses on speeding up computations across chips, circuits, and entire computing systems, rather than squeezing ever-more components onto a single piece of silicon.
“We found a new path,” He said at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems in Shanghai last weekend. He, who is known in China as Huawei’s “chip queen,” promised that the company would prove the viability of the new approach, presumably with a new chip, in the coming months.
“Before winter 2026, we will bring the surprise,” He said. “Not saturation, not continuation, but a big leap ahead.”
The chip queen calls the new approach Tau’s Scaling Law, and says it has replaced Moore’s Law as HiSilicon’s guiding principle. Moore’s Law, named for the Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, dictates that progress in computing depends on roughly doubling the number of transistors, or logic gates, packed into a chip every two years.
Minting cutting-edge chips currently involves etching components into silicon using billion-dollar lithographic equipment, a supply chain of exquisitely delicate components, and extensive engineering know-how.
US export controls prohibit Huawei from working with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's leading chip foundry. Huawei must instead rely on China’s SMIC, which uses an older generation of lithography machines. Crucially, restrictions limit China’s ability to develop frontier artificial intelligence using its own silicon. By some estimates, it’s more than five years behind the leading edge.
But the chip industry has begun running into the limits of Moore’s Law. When transistors are just a few nanometers wide, quantum effects interfere with their normal functioning. Many chips are already made with workarounds: Apple’s most powerful processors, for example, are built by stitching two chips together to make a more powerful single one.
Huawei’s announcement suggests that the company believes it has found a way around these limits. It also suggests that the sanctions aimed at kneecapping China’s chip industry have spurred innovations that may, over time, allow the country to build a more advanced domestic chip industry and compete with the West. In the end, innovations from companies like Huawei could erode America’s technological edge.
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