Huawei chairman credits US sanctions with accelerating China's chip industry

Huawei chairman Xu Zhijun has said that U.S. sanctions ultimately had a positive effect on China's entire semiconductor industry. As TechRadar reports, the comments summed up several years of export controls that have, since 2019, restricted Huawei's access to advanced chip manufacturing technologies and foreign supply chains.

Huawei previously relied heavily on overseas contractors to produce its most advanced chips, and once sanctions tightened, that dependence became a major operational constraint. The company was forced to overhaul its approach to chip design and manufacturing by working with whatever production capacity was available within China, rather than waiting for ready-made solutions from abroad. According to Xu, the shift pushed not only Huawei but the broader Chinese semiconductor industry to accelerate development across multiple technical layers at once.

"If it weren't for the United States forcing our country, our company, and our industry, we wouldn't have been able to do something like this," Xu said, adding that he was grateful to the United States for effectively enabling China's semiconductor sector to "truly grow." The remarks came in response to a question about how Huawei had developed its new LogicFolding chip architecture. The company has previously stated that it expects to bring the transistor density of its chips up to the equivalent of a 1.4-nanometer process within five years, a level comparable to the advanced node TSMC is expected to deliver by the end of the decade.

Analysts have pointed out that the sanctions created a protected domestic market for Chinese chipmakers. Rather than competing directly with Nvidia and other industry leaders, Chinese manufacturers gained a large captive base of customers with limited access to alternatives. The shift was further reinforced by Beijing's policy direction, which has elevated semiconductor self-sufficiency to a national priority. Xu did not soften the broader picture, however, acknowledging that China still lags several years behind global leaders in the most advanced manufacturing technologies, even though notable progress has been made at many intermediate stages of the chip production chain.