Huawei says its new smartphone chip is entirely free of any US-made components

Date:
Tue, 15 Sep 2026 20:10:00 +0000

Description:
Huawei Kirin 9050 Pro backs up US-free claim while touting major performance gains under the hood.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Huawei's new Kirin 9050 Pro is being called its "most powerful" all-Chinese chip tech giant has ever made Huawei is claiming a 55% density gain by 'folding' its chip in half and stacking it instead of shrinking the actual die The chip still uses US hardware and foreign technology to manufacture, including ASML scanners and pre-2022 Applied Materials and Lam Research equipment Huawei has introduced the Kirin 9050 Pro, a mobile processor that it says is fully free of American technology.

The chip powers the Mate XT 2, the third device in the company's tri-fold line, which starts at 19,999 yuan (~$2,980), and went on sale in China on September 12 2026. The South China Morning Post noted Huawei is reducing reliance on advanced foreign semiconductor equipment, and this might be what the state-backed AI and chip giant wanted to highlight above all else, even
as it refused to mention sanctions anywhere in its own press materials.
Latest Videos From TechRadar Watch full video here: An impressive SoC that continues to indicate a shrinking technological gap Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei's consumer business group, said on stage that the Kirin 9050 Pro is
the company's "most powerful Kirin chip ever" and, based on the performance figures, touts a 42% overall improvement over the last-gen Mate XTs' Kirin 9020.

At the chip level, it claims 24% higher peak single-core and 52% better multi-core throughput against the Kirin 9030 Pro, plus a 142% jump in
graphics rendering. The nine-core LinxiCore CPU peaks at 3.1GHz, the Maleoon GPU adds hardware ray tracing, and the Da Vinci NPU runs a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model on device. You may like Huawei could join Samsung as the only tech firms producing its own CPUs, SSDs, and DRAM Honor and ARRI explain why the Robot Phone's extremely high processing power makes it such a revolutionary device Huawei's new ultra-light laptop is genuinely ridiculously slim and slender at just 798g - but Western fans might never get their hands on one

The performance figures alone aren't the only interesting thing about
Huawei's new silicon offering; the Kirin 9050 Pro is the first commercial silicon built on LogicFolding, a technique Huawei semiconductor chief He Tingbo presented at IEEE ISCAS in Shanghai in May and expanded on in a signed paper.

Rather than shrinking transistors, LogicFolding splits logic across two
active silicon layers bonded face to face, with roughly 50 million vertical interconnects at a pitch of about 1.5 micrometers. Because signals travel shorter distances, Huawei says it could lower operating voltage while raising density. Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.

However, all of these figures (including performance) come directly from Huawei, with no independent verification or peer-reviewed studies. More interestingly, while the Kirin is considerably less dependent on US or
Western tech, it doesn't remove it from the equation entirely, and you still have to look closely at the bill of materials for receipts.

Huawei did not announce a process node for the Kirin 9050 Pro, and that silence has been deafening in more ways than one. SemiAnalysis tore down the predecessor in June 2026 and found SMIC's third-generation 7nm process, N+3, reaching about 113 million transistors per square millimeter with no extreme ultraviolet lithography anywhere in the flow.

SMIC's process, however, still leverages ASML immersion scanners. Bloomberg reported in 2024 that SMIC built the earlier Kirin 9000s using equipment acquired from Applied Materials and Lam Research before the October 2022 export rules closed that door, and the same is still in play here.

Despite this, Huawei has come a long way since its phones were declared America-free seven years ago. A UBS and Fomalhaut Techno Solutions analysis seen by the Wall Street Journal in late 2019 found the Mate 30 Pro contained no American parts , and Huawei cybersecurity officer John Suffolk told the paper that "all of our 5G is now America-free." The Kirin 990 inside that phone, however, was fabricated by TSMC on an EUV node.

Huawei's approach, backed by the Chinese state, to essentially rid itself of US influence in the fabrication end of the spectrum remains more of an
ongoing struggle than one which it has already achieved, even as it continues to push ahead in certain disciplines and erode a performance gap that
industry players earlier thought would take years longer than it is now projected to. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred
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