Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has admitted he was “shocked” to discover that Huawei has quietly assembled a team of over 100 top-tier CPU architects—even as the company remains cut off from the world’s most advanced chipmaking tools and design software.Speaking at Intel’s Second Annual AI Summit on February 3, Tan said he stumbled upon Huawei’s talent pipeline while trying to recruit senior chip designers himself. When he asked some of the engineers why they chose Huawei, they told him bluntly: “Even though we don’t have access to the best tools like EDA from Cadence and Synopsys, we have our own way to do it.”What surprised Tan further was their confidence about hardware. When he brought up ASML’s advanced lithography equipment—which China cannot legally access—the engineers reportedly said they were “quietly building” alternatives.
Huawei is closing the gap faster than the US expected
Tan warned that Huawei and other Chinese tech firms are narrowing the semiconductor gap through sheer engineering effort and infrastructure optimisation. While the US leads in cutting-edge process nodes like 2-nanometer, Chinese companies are squeezing far more performance out of older 7-nanometer technology by redirecting their resources toward software and system-level improvements.He also pointed to China’s regulatory advantage. “If they decide to have it, they quickly can get all the approval and get it done,” Tan said, contrasting it with the slower pace of approvals in the United States, particularly around power infrastructure for AI data centres.
DeepSeek was a wake-up call, says Intel chief
Tan didn’t stop at Huawei. He flagged DeepSeek’s emergence as a turning point that caught much of the US tech industry off guard. He also said multiple well-connected people had told him that in open-source AI development, the US is now trailing China—a gap he believes needs urgent attention and funding.
Why the US chip advantage may not last without action
Before US sanctions hit in 2020, Huawei was spending roughly $10 billion a year on chips from the likes of Samsung and SK Hynix. Now forced into self-reliance, the company has expanded to over 200,000 employees globally and is preparing for a product launch in Madrid on February 26, where a new Kirin chipset is expected to debut.Tan’s message was clear: the US cannot afford complacency. “If you’re not careful,” he said, “they’re just ahead of us.”
