Huawei outlines chip and HarmonyOS push

At a Shenzhen media roundtable, Richard Yu described Huawei’s consumer strategy around a seamless AI life spanning HIMA-powered Smart Travel, HarmonyOS Office, Smart Home, Fitness & Health, and Entertainment. Between 2007 and 2025, Huawei invested more than CNY1.8 trillion into R&D, moving from roughly 10% of annual revenue in earlier years to over 20% recently.

Huawei’s new Mate 90 series uses the Kirin 9050 Pro chip, with overall device performance 31% higher than the previous generation. The company said the chip incorporates its own Balong modem, ISP, MSP, Lingxi CPU, Maleoon GPU and Da Vinci-based NPU, while LogicFolding technology vertically stacks logic layers to shorten critical paths and reduce latency. The Mate 90 series can run a 30B MoE on-device AI model.

Yu positioned Ascend, openPangu and HarmonyOS Celia as central to Huawei’s AI ecosystem, alongside AI use in communications network operations and maintenance. More than 90 million devices currently run on HarmonyOS 6 and HarmonyOS 7, with the figure expected to reach the 100 million mark by the end of this year. The ecosystem has exceeded 450,000 apps and services, reached 11 million registered developers and added over 23,000 app innovation partners.

Huawei is considering a gradual global rollout for HarmonyOS while trying to rebuild overseas sales after its smartphone business contracted outside China. Yu said the company has reduced reliance on US technologies through domestic chips, tools and supply chains, and expects more phones to use LogicFolding chips, though advanced semiconductor capacity in China remains tight.