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Seven years ago the ban was meant to end Huawei. Last month it shipped a chip the sanctions were designed to make impossible, then today Qualcomm licensed the patents behind it. In May 2019 Washington put Huawei on the Entity List and Google pulled Android within days, then by September 2020 TSMC had stopped making Kirin altogether. Richard Yu told a conference in China that year might be the last generation of Huawei’s high-end chips, while allies were also being leaned on to rip the gear out of their networks. The charge was spying, a backdoor and a listening post disguised as a router. The evidence never appeared. An 18-month review ordered by the White House and reported by Reuters in October 2012 questioned nearly 1,000 telecom equipment buyers and found no clear evidence of spying. One individual expressed it clearly, stating they would have found it if it existed. The congressional chairman who claimed customers had watched routers send valuable data to China was quietly corrected, because the company was Leap Wireless and its own investigation found infected computers and no stolen data. Nothing since then has changed that. The trial that opened in Brooklyn on the 9th September runs on Iran sanctions, bank fraud, racketeering and trade secrets covering Cisco source code, a T-Mobile testing robot and an old Motorola file, with no espionage count anywhere on it. After seven years of bans the original accusation is still not on the charge sheet. Huawei was already the world’s largest maker of telecoms equipment and, in the second quarter of 2020, briefly the largest phone maker on earth, the first company outside Samsung and Apple to top the table in nine years. The cut-off was meant to stop it there, but it did the exact opposite. Without Android it built HarmonyOS and without TSMC it turned to SMIC and DUV multi-patterning. When the Mate 60 Pro appeared during a visit by the US commerce secretary in 2023, teardowns found a SMIC 7nm Kirin 9000s built without EUV, so Washington opened a probe. The Commerce Department’s own statement revealed the honest truth: the restrictions in place since 2019 “have knocked Huawei down and forced it to reinvent itself”. The machines came next. Chinese immersion DUV scanners are in production-line validation at domestic fabs, where Huawei’s own investment arm has put money into the domestic light source and the projection optics. When that story arrived in July, ASML lost about 44 billion dollars of market value in a single day. The architecture changed after that. On the 7th of September 2026, in Guangzhou, the Mate XT 2 shipped on the Kirin 9050 Pro, the first mass-produced phone chip built on Huawei’s Tau scaling law and LogicFolding. Instead of waiting for a smaller transistor (following Moore’s Law) it stacks logic and shortens the wire. Density goes from about 155 million to 238 million transistors per square millimetre, which is a step the older geometric treadmill needed three years to make. Multi-core performance is up 52% with the whole device 42% ahead of the previous Mate XT. The honest part is that this is still a 7nm-class chip printed on DUV with Bernstein putting it roughly 30% behind Apple’s newest, so the gap has gone from four years to three rather than to nothing. Four weeks after Guangzhou the Mate 90 series shipped. Then Monday happened. Huawei and Qualcomm announced a multi-year cross-licence covering 5G, computing, AI and networking, with Qualcomm also buying a set of Huawei’s US patents in computing, AI and networking. Bloomberg reported that the agreement reaches near- and co-packaged optics as well as the patents underpinning LogicFolding, which means the American company that used to sell Huawei its phone chips is now licensing the architecture Huawei built to navigate around the ban. Huawei first paid Qualcomm for patents in 2001 and the money ran one way for a quarter of a century. In 2020 Huawei handed Qualcomm 1.8 billion dollars in back royalties. Nikkei reported that once this agreement takes effect, Qualcomm becomes a net payer to Huawei for the first time ever. Huawei expects the total value of its patent licensing agreements to pass 6.9 billion dollars when the deal closes. It needs US regulatory approval before that happens, so Washington still holds a vote on whether the company it blacklisted can collect royalties from San Diego. Moore’s law was a manufacturing treadmill owned by whoever held the next ASML machine, while Tau is the workaround, performance by design rather than by permission. Washington spent seven years trying to keep China one node behind. Huawei answered by changing the ruler. Living here in China, the shift seems usual nowadays. HarmonyOS is on 85 million devices, tri-folds sit on restaurant tables and the chip roadmap no longer asks Cupertino or Eindhoven for the next step. A ban with no public proof of spying built a rival that no longer needs your operating system, your foundry or your scaling law, one that now licenses the patents behind its own chip architecture to San Diego. Who exactly got contained?

commiepommie's tweet photo. Seven years ago the ban was meant to end Huawei.
Last month it shipped a chip the sanctions were designed to make impossible, then today Qualcomm licensed the patents behind it.

In May 2019 Washington put Huawei on the Entity List and Google pulled Android within days, then by September 2020 TSMC had stopped making Kirin altogether. Richard Yu told a conference in China that year might be the last generation of Huawei’s high-end chips, while allies were also being leaned on to rip the gear out of their networks.

The charge was spying, a backdoor and a listening post disguised as a router.

The evidence never appeared. An 18-month review ordered by the White House and reported by Reuters in October 2012 questioned nearly 1,000 telecom equipment buyers and found no clear evidence of spying. One individual expressed it clearly, stating they would have found it if it existed. The congressional chairman who claimed customers had watched routers send valuable data to China was quietly corrected, because the company was Leap Wireless and its own investigation found infected computers and no stolen data.

Nothing since then has changed that. The trial that opened in Brooklyn on the 9th September runs on Iran sanctions, bank fraud, racketeering and trade secrets covering Cisco source code, a T-Mobile testing robot and an old Motorola file, with no espionage count anywhere on it. After seven years of bans the original accusation is still not on the charge sheet.

Huawei was already the world’s largest maker of telecoms equipment and, in the second quarter of 2020, briefly the largest phone maker on earth, the first company outside Samsung and Apple to top the table in nine years. The cut-off was meant to stop it there, but it did the exact opposite.

Without Android it built HarmonyOS and without TSMC it turned to SMIC and DUV multi-patterning. When the Mate 60 Pro appeared during a visit by the US commerce secretary in 2023, teardowns found a SMIC 7nm Kirin 9000s built without EUV, so Washington opened a probe. The Commerce Department’s own statement revealed the honest truth: the restrictions in place since 2019 “have knocked Huawei down and forced it to reinvent itself”.

The machines came next. Chinese immersion DUV scanners are in production-line validation at domestic fabs, where Huawei’s own investment arm has put money into the domestic light source and the projection optics. When that story arrived in July, ASML lost about 44 billion dollars of market value in a single day.

The architecture changed after that. On the 7th of September 2026, in Guangzhou, the Mate XT 2 shipped on the Kirin 9050 Pro, the first mass-produced phone chip built on Huawei’s Tau scaling law and LogicFolding. Instead of waiting for a smaller transistor (following Moore’s Law) it stacks logic and shortens the wire. Density goes from about 155 million to 238 million transistors per square millimetre, which is a step the older geometric treadmill needed three years to make. Multi-core performance is up 52% with the whole device 42% ahead of the previous Mate XT.

The honest part is that this is still a 7nm-class chip printed on DUV with Bernstein putting it roughly 30% behind Apple’s newest, so the gap has gone from four years to three rather than to nothing.

Four weeks after Guangzhou the Mate 90 series shipped.

Then Monday happened. Huawei and Qualcomm announced a multi-year cross-licence covering 5G, computing, AI and networking, with Qualcomm also buying a set of Huawei’s US patents in computing, AI and networking. Bloomberg reported that the agreement reaches near- and co-packaged optics as well as the patents underpinning LogicFolding, which means the American company that used to sell Huawei its phone chips is now licensing the architecture Huawei built to navigate around the ban.

Huawei first paid Qualcomm for patents in 2001 and the money ran one way for a quarter of a century. In 2020 Huawei handed Qualcomm 1.8 billion dollars in back royalties. Nikkei reported that once this agreement takes effect, Qualcomm becomes a net payer to Huawei for the first time ever. Huawei expects the total value of its patent licensing agreements to pass 6.9 billion dollars when the deal closes.

It needs US regulatory approval before that happens, so Washington still holds a vote on whether the company it blacklisted can collect royalties from San Diego.

Moore’s law was a manufacturing treadmill owned by whoever held the next ASML machine, while Tau is the workaround, performance by design rather than by permission. Washington spent seven years trying to keep China one node behind. Huawei answered by changing the ruler.

Living here in China, the shift seems usual nowadays. HarmonyOS is on 85 million devices, tri-folds sit on restaurant tables and the chip roadmap no longer asks Cupertino or Eindhoven for the next step.

A ban with no public proof of spying built a rival that no longer needs your operating system, your foundry or your scaling law, one that now licenses the patents behind its own chip architecture to San Diego.

Who exactly got contained?

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