Huawei says its new smartphone chip is entirely free of any US-made components
Huawei declared its phones America-free in 2019
by https://www.techradar.com/author/rahim-amir · TechRadarNews By Rahim Amir Published 15 September 2026
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- Huawei's new Kirin 9050 Pro is being called its "most powerful" all-Chinese chip tech giant has ever made
- Huawei is claiming a 55% density gain by 'folding' its chip in half and stacking it instead of shrinking the actual die
- The chip still uses US hardware and foreign technology to manufacture, including ASML scanners and pre-2022 Applied Materials and Lam Research equipment
Huawei has introduced the Kirin 9050 Pro, a mobile processor that it says is fully free of American technology.
The chip powers the Mate XT 2, the third device in the company's tri-fold line, which starts at 19,999 yuan (~$2,980), and went on sale in China on September 12 2026.
The South China Morning Post noted Huawei is reducing reliance on advanced foreign semiconductor equipment, and this might be what the state-backed AI and chip giant wanted to highlight above all else, even as it refused to mention sanctions anywhere in its own press materials.
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An impressive SoC that continues to indicate a shrinking technological gap
Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei's consumer business group, said on stage that the Kirin 9050 Pro is the company's "most powerful Kirin chip ever" and, based on the performance figures, touts a 42% overall improvement over the last-gen Mate XTs' Kirin 9020.
At the chip level, it claims 24% higher peak single-core and 52% better multi-core throughput against the Kirin 9030 Pro, plus a 142% jump in graphics rendering. The nine-core LinxiCore CPU peaks at 3.1GHz, the Maleoon GPU adds hardware ray tracing, and the Da Vinci NPU runs a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model on device.
The performance figures alone aren't the only interesting thing about Huawei's new silicon offering; the Kirin 9050 Pro is the first commercial silicon built on LogicFolding, a technique Huawei semiconductor chief He Tingbo presented at IEEE ISCAS in Shanghai in May and expanded on in a signed paper.
Rather than shrinking transistors, LogicFolding splits logic across two active silicon layers bonded face to face, with roughly 50 million vertical interconnects at a pitch of about 1.5 micrometers. Because signals travel shorter distances, Huawei says it could lower operating voltage while raising density.
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