Huawei unveiled its Mate 90 smartphone series with a spotlight on its latest in-house chip architecture, amid continued US curbs on advanced semiconductor shipments.

The Mate 90 range comprises four models running on Huawei’s HarmonyOS 7, which the company said supports more than 450,000 apps and services. Pricing starts at CNY5,999 ($895) for the base Mate 90, with the top end Mate 90 RS Ultimate Design reaching CNY12,999.

The premium models use Huawei’s Kirin 9050 Pro chipset, which the vendor claimed delivers a 31% performance boost compared with the previous generation. The chip also integrates Huawei’s LogicFolding technology, which restructures chip wiring vertically to enable denser processing, shorter critical paths and reduced latency.

Price hikes
In a briefing, Huawei executive director and consumer business chief Richard Yu explained the Chinese vendor developed the technology in response to restrictions on advanced semiconductor manufacturing.

“Our LogicFolding technology is just an approach we adopt to improve our capabilities when our access to certain technology is restricted,” he said.

“Currently, the production capacity for advanced semiconductors in China is indeed limited,” Yu noted, adding semiconductor and smartphone production capacity “remains tight” due to the “sharp price increase for memory components over the past two years”.

To that end, he revealed component price hikes had added more than $200 to the cost of each handset, while Huawei’s margins were coming under pressure. “Moving forward, we will have to increase our prices, too,” he concluded.

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AI start-up DeepSeek partnered with Huawei to launch an open-source programming software toolkit optimised for the vendor’s Ascend chips, as the Chinese companies up efforts to expand the AI market beyond Nvidia’s technology.

DeepSeek stated on its WeChat account the toolkit is free to download and includes the TileLang platform, which can be compared to Nvidia’s Cuda that is widely considered as a global standard for developing AI models.

The Chinese AI company explained TileLang is “simpler to programme, significantly improving development efficiency and simplifying code logic”.

It added the open-source programming includes compute and communication libraries.

DeepSeek stated it worked with Huawei on its Ascend 950 chips and praised the vendor for providing “unwavering and strong support” during R&D.

“To do a good job, one must first have the right tools,” DeepSeek stated, arguing the first step to building an independent, GPU software ecosystem is to establish an easy-to-programme high-level language which “can simultaneously reach the hardware performance limits”.

Bloomberg reported earlier this month DeepSeek plans to deploy at least 160,000 Huawei AI accelerators at a new data centre in Inner Mongolia.

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