Microsoft’s supply license to Huawei will expire this month, and unless renewed, Huawei will no longer be legally allowed to produce and sell PCs with Windows. This is due to Huawei being on the US Department of Commerce’s entity list, with American companies such as Microsoft requiring an export license to deal with them.
Without the license, the company will have to equip its PCs with an OS that is made in China. Huawei’s chairman and executive director Richard Yu has said back in September that the company will be shifting its PCs from running Windows to its own HarmonyOS. And with the Windows license expiring, it sounds like the perfect time for said transition.
Aligning with Yu’s statement, Huawei is reportedly planning to launch an ‘AI PC’ in April. This laptop is said to run its own Kunpeng CPU, HarmonyOS for PCs, and various DeepSeek LLM-based applications, as its name implies.
Without Windows, Huawei PCs will have to rely on either open-sourced Linux distributions, or its homegrown HarmonyOS. While the latter might prove itself a popular choice in China, it is highly possible it would not do well in markets that are more familiar with Windows, such as Europe and the United States.
(Sources: MyDrivers, Tom’s Hardware)
Manisha Dharmendra contributed to this article.
