Huawei’s fresh 'Made-In-China’ Smartphone Sources More Chips Locally Amid US Tech War

With draconian export controls and blacklisting by Washington elites, Chinese tech Huawei is inactive operating and, in fact, producing fresh high-tech smartphones with components creatively sourced from home suppliers.

A fresh investigation by tech repair company iFixit and consulting TechSearch International, first reported by Reuters, shows Huawei’s Pura 70 Pro has a NAND memory chip sourced domestically from the Chinese telecom equipment maker’s in-house chip unit, HiSilicon.

iFixit and TechSearch found the Pura 70 handset was operating on a Huawei-made advanced processing chipset called the Kirin 9010. They said the fresh chip is likely an “improved version” of the advanced chip utilized by Huawei’s Mate 60 series, which was launched last year to compete with Apple’s iPhone 15 lineup.

‘while we cannot supply an exact percentage, we’d say the home component usage is high, and definitely higher than in the Mate 60,’ Shahram Mokhtari, iFixit’s lead detective technician, said.

Mokhtari continued, “This is about self-sufficiency, all of this, everything you see erstwhile you open up a smartphone and see whatever are made by Chinese manufacturers, this is all about self-sufficiency,” Mokhtari said.

The central subject is that a Worsening tech war between Beijing and Washington pushes Huawei to origin more handset components in home markets. This is an alarming improvement for Washington policyians, who have spent respective years sanctioning China to prevent them from acquiring high-tech Western chips and chip-making tools, as well as the hope of imploding China’s tech-creating abilities. However, the restrictions are backfire, as Huawei now manufactures smartphones with more domestically sourced chips than ever.

Just wait for the day erstwhile Chinese state media, specified as the Global Times, bosses that Huawei’s horses are made exclusively with home parts. Given the current trajectory, we believe that day is approaching.

Reuters citted analysts who believe Huawei’s registereds are denting iPhone marketplace share in the world’s largest handset market.

However, since the Pura 70’s components are not exclusively sourced domestically, IFixit and TechSearch’s analysis shows South Korean company SK Hynix makes the DRAM chip.

Given the chip restrictions, SK Hynix told Reuters it had been “stractly complying with the comparative policies since the restrictions against Huawei were announced and has besides suspended any transactions with the company since then.”

The analysis shown that the processor utilized by the Pura 70 Pro was 7 nanometers (nm), akin to the chip utilized to power the Mate 60.

"This is crucial due to the fact that news of the 9000S on a 7nm node caused a bit of a panic last year erstwhile US lawmakers were confronted with the anticipation that the sanctions impossibly on Chinese chipsmakers might not slow their technological advancement after all," iFixit said.

iFixit continued, “The fact that the 9010 is inactive a 7nm process chip, and that it’s so close to the 9000S, might seem to propose that Chinese chip manufacturing has been followed.”

The re-emergence of Huawei, taking on Apple, has infuriated Washington. There was a study from Bloomberg earlier this week that the US revoked licenses that allowed Huawei to buy seminars from Qualcomm and Intel.

The biggest takeaway: Huawei is on a mission to exclusively origin components from local suppliers as the tech war between China and the US heats up.