Huawei founder claims chips are a generation behind the US

The founder of Huawei has stated that the United States is overestimating the capabilities of the Chinese chip manufacturer, even as trade negotiations, including export controls, continue between Beijing and Washington.

In a rare interview with China’s state-run newspaper People’s Daily on Tuesday, Ren Zhengfei said that Huawei’s Ascend chip, the main domestic rival to Nvidia’s products in China, is “still one generation behind the US.” He added, “The US is overestimating Huawei’s capabilities; we are not that strong yet.”

Ren’s comments follow recent warnings from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about Huawei’s advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) chips. Huang argued that Washington’s restrictions on the US chipmaker’s sales to China have inadvertently created a “formidable” competitor, threatening America’s dominance in AI technology.

The US and China began a new round of trade negotiations in London on Monday, with Washington’s export controls on key technologies on the agenda.

During the initial round of talks in Geneva, the US did not bring up export controls. However, Beijing’s recent restrictions on certain critical rare earth elements and minerals used in automobile manufacturing, which threaten to shut down factory lines in the US, Europe, and Japan, have pushed the issue to the forefront of trade discussions.

Huawei has benefited from Washington’s ban on Nvidia chip shipments to China, as Chinese tech giants have accelerated their purchases of Ascend chips and made preparations to adopt Huawei’s technology.

Still, most Chinese AI companies, including DeepSeek, rely on Nvidia chips to train the large language models (LLMs) that power their AI tools. For less complex tasks, such as inferencing models to generate responses in tools like chatbots, domestic alternatives are increasingly being used.

Analysts and Huawei researchers have previously noted technical difficulties when using the company’s chips to train LLMs, citing challenges in getting the chips to work together and distribute the computational workload effectively.

On Tuesday, Ren implied that the company has made significant strides in resolving these issues, stating that Huawei can “compensate” for lower performance through cluster computing, which links multiple chips to boost AI server power.

“By using clustering and stacking, our computing results are comparable to the best in the world,” he said.

Ren mentioned that Huawei invests 180 billion yuan ($25 billion) annually in research and development, with 60 billion yuan dedicated not to product development but to basic research aimed at groundbreaking discoveries.

He also noted that China possesses distinct advantages in developing its technological capacity.

“Artificial intelligence depends on abundant electricity and an advanced network infrastructure,” he explained. “China’s power generation and grid systems are world-class. Our telecommunications infrastructure is one of the most advanced in the world.”