BEIJING – Chipmaking giant Nvidia has acknowledged increasing competition from China’s Huawei, despite ongoing U.S. sanctions against the telecommunications firm.
In its annual filing on Wednesday, Nvidia identified Huawei as a key competitor for the second consecutive year. The company had not been listed as a rival in at least three previous years. Huawei now appears in four out of five competitive categories, including chips, cloud services, computing processing, and networking products.
“There’s significant competition in China,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC’s Jon Fortt on Wednesday. “Huawei and other companies are highly aggressive and extremely competitive.”
Since 2019, the U.S. government has imposed restrictions on Huawei, limiting its access to American technology, including advanced 5G chips and Google’s Android operating system.
Despite these constraints, Huawei’s revenue surged to over 860 billion yuan ($118.27 billion) in 2024, marking a 22% increase from 2023—the company’s fastest growth since 2016, based on CNBC calculations of publicly available data. Huawei typically releases its annual reports in March.
The company had struggled in recent years, with revenue stagnating in 2020 and plunging nearly 29% in 2021. Its consumer business was particularly affected, and although it rebounded by 17% year-over-year to 251.5 billion yuan in 2023, the figure remained significantly below its 2020 peak.
Huawei made a strong comeback in the smartphone market in 2023 with the launch of the Mate 60 Pro, a device featuring download speeds comparable to 5G, thanks to an advanced semiconductor chip. A little over a year later, the company introduced the Mate 70 series, which runs on its first fully self-developed operating system, HarmonyOS NEXT.