HiSilicon

HiSilicon is Huawei's chip design subsidiary, capable of designing most of the major chips found in a smartphone . It was one of the earliest proofs that China had a chip industry at all — in 2016 it became the first Chinese company to crack the global top 20 in the chip industry, a milestone 峰瑞资本 highlighted in its 2018 year-end essay, which predicted it could reach the global top five within a few years . Its flagship programs span server CPUs (Kunpeng), ARM cores (Taishan), and AI training/inference chips (Ascend), projects led by longtime executive Chen Peng, who spent nearly two decades at the company before moving to Horizon Robotics in 2023 and, most recently, founding his own chip startup Jiuwanli, per a BlueRun Ventures piece . The company has also served as a talent base for China's AI chip scene — Xingyun Integrated Circuit founder Yu Ji, a former Huawei "Genius Youth" recruit, worked on AI chip compiler design and optimization there .