Chip giant Nvidia has highlighted growing competition from Huawei, even as U.S. restrictions continue to limit the Chinese telecommunications company’s access to American technology.
In its annual filing on Wednesday, Nvidia listed Huawei as one of its competitors for the second consecutive year. The company had not previously been included among Nvidia’s rivals for at least three years before that.
Nvidia now considers Huawei a competitor in four of five categories: chips, cloud services, computing processing, and networking products.
“There’s a fair amount of competition in China,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC’s Jon Fortt on Wednesday. “Huawei, other companies, are … quite vigorous and very, very competitive.”
Huawei’s Resurgence Amid U.S. Sanctions
Since 2019, U.S. sanctions have severely restricted Huawei’s access to American technology, including advanced 5G chips and Google’s Android operating system. However, the company has shown signs of recovery.
Huawei’s revenue surpassed 860 billion yuan ($118.27 billion) in 2024, a 22% increase from 2023. This marks the company’s fastest growth since a 32% surge in 2016, according to CNBC calculations of publicly available figures. Huawei typically publishes its annual reports in March.
The company’s financial performance had suffered in the years following U.S. sanctions. Revenue barely grew in 2020 and dropped nearly 29% in 2021. Even as revenue rebounded by 17% year-over-year to 251.5 billion yuan in 2023, it remained just over half of the consumer unit’s peak earnings in 2020.
Smartphone Market Comeback
Huawei began making a comeback in the smartphone market in 2023 with the release of its Mate 60 Pro in China. Reviews indicated that the device offered download speeds associated with 5G, enabled by an advanced semiconductor chip.
Just over a year later, Huawei introduced the Mate 70 smartphone series, featuring HarmonyOS NEXT—the company’s first fully self-developed operating system.
