A high-ranking Huawei executive has made a once-in-a-blue-moon admission that they are concerned about China’s inability to secure 3.5nm chips, and that its government may have hit a wall in its semiconductor initiative.
Zhang Ping’an, CEO of Huawei’s Cloud Services, expressed these concerns during the Mobile Computility Network Conference in Suzhou, China. The comment is surprising, given how China has been posturing itself as an independent force, unhindered by the ongoing US sanctions against it and its semiconductor industry.
Huawei has been at the forefront of China’s home-grown semiconductor market. The company recently succeeded in mass-producing its own 7nm chips, all without the use of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology that is readily available to the Taiwanese foundry, TSMC. 3.5nm chips notwithstanding, the company said that it already plans on moving forward with the development of 3nm chips, along with the local semiconductor maker SMIC.
Unfortunately for Huawei, its drive doesn’t change the reality of it requiring EUV technology to produce 3.5nm chips, a technology that China, at large, does not yet possess. For now, the company will have to contend with its ability to run 7nm process nodes en masse.
(Source: Business Korea via Tom’s Hardware)
