Huawei is positioning itself as China’s counterpart to NVIDIA, aiming to provide the platform underpinning the country’s artificial intelligence and semiconductor industries. Guo Ping, chairman of Huawei’s top supervisory body, told new employees that the company’s goal in information and communication technology and computing is to become NVIDIA, with a focus on helping customers develop superior AI models. The company designs smartphone and AI-server chips while supporting Chinese foundries, memory producers and semiconductor equipment makers. U.S. sanctions imposed in 2019 and expanded in 2020 cut Huawei off from TSMC production, halving smartphone revenue within a year and forcing the company to deploy domestic alternatives. Its HiSilicon design unit works with SMIC, the world’s third-largest foundry, while Huawei draws Chinese AI models into its Ascend ecosystem (Huawei’s AI computing platform) and CANN software. Through Hubble Technology Investment, Huawei has reportedly invested in more than 60 Chinese semiconductor companies and has become involved in lithography equipment development. Significant gaps remain in advanced-process yields and costs, high-bandwidth memory, equipment and software reach. Huawei has proposed linking hundreds or thousands of lower-performance domestic chips to raise overall computing performance.