Huawei says new chip strategy could reach 1.4-nanometre performance by 2031

Huawei Technologies used a keynote in Shanghai to argue that China’s chip industry may be able to sidestep, rather than simply endure, U.S. export controls. The company said it expected to design high-end chips by 2031 with transistor density equivalent to 1.4-nanometre processes, or 14 angstroms, a level that would put it near the frontier of global chipmaking.

He Tingbo, Huawei’s semiconductor business president and director of its Scientist Committee, presented the idea at the 2026 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, the flagship conference of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. Huawei called the framework the Tau Scaling Law and said it replaced geometric scaling with time, or tau, scaling as the guiding principle for semiconductor and system evolution. The company said the approach was meant to reduce signal propagation delay, improve performance and raise energy efficiency by co-optimizing devices, circuits, chips and systems.

The most concrete near-term change Huawei described was LogicFolding, an architecture it said would debut in Kirin chips scheduled for fall 2026. Huawei said those chips would be the first products to use LogicFolding and that the design would shorten wiring inside chips to improve performance. The company also cited a system-level technology called UnifiedBus as part of the broader Tau framework.

Huawei said it had designed and mass-produced 381 chips over the past six years under the Tau Scaling Law, spanning products from smartphones to AI computing. That scale of deployment matters because it suggests the company is not presenting the framework as a lab theory alone, but as a method it says is already feeding commercial hardware.

Still, the claim lands inside a much larger geopolitical fight. Huawei was added to the U.S. Commerce Department’s Entity List in 2019, and restrictions were tightened in 2020 to limit its access to foreign-produced semiconductors made with U.S. technology. The company’s 2023 Mate 60 Pro, with its domestically made 7-nanometer-class chip, already showed how central semiconductors have become to Beijing’s push for self-reliance. If Huawei’s Tau strategy works, it could become a blueprint for Chinese firms trying to move around the export-control bottleneck. If it falls short, it will show how dependent advanced chipmaking still remains on the lithography and manufacturing tools that China cannot easily buy.

Huawei did not provide independent performance data to back the new target, so the 2031 projection remains a company assertion, not a verified benchmark. But the message was unmistakable: sanctions may have slowed Huawei’s chip roadmap, yet they have also pushed the company to redraw the roadmap itself.