Huawei said to unveil tech to cut China’s reliance on HBM chips

Huawei Technologies is set to unveil a technological breakthrough that could reduce China’s reliance on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips for AI reasoning, according to state-run Securities Times.

The announcement is scheduled for August 12, 2025 at the 2025 Financial AI Reasoning Application Landing and Development Forum in Shanghai, held in collaboration with China UnionPay.

HBM chips, crucial for AI applications, are mainly supplied by US companies Micron Technology and Advanced Micro Devices, as well as South Korean firms Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.

Last year, the US government under the Biden administration banned exports of advanced HBM products to China as part of broader efforts to curb China’s semiconductor development.

Huawei plans to present solutions for “AI storage reasoning acceleration” at the event, but specific details have not been disclosed.

🔗 Source: South China Morning Post

🧠 Food for thought

1️⃣ Extreme market concentration makes HBM a strategic chokepoint

The HBM market’s concentration creates significant supply chain vulnerabilities that explain China’s urgency to develop alternatives.

SK Hynix alone controls over 60% of the global HBM market, primarily supplying Nvidia’s high-end GPUs, while the entire market is dominated by just three companies: SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron 1.

This concentration becomes more problematic when considering HBM’s rapid growth trajectory. Demand is projected to expand at a 50% compound annual growth rate from 2024 to 2028, accounting for around 30% of the total memory market by 2024 1 2.

For China, this dependency is particularly acute because Huawei’s domestically produced AI chips already lag behind Nvidia’s performance, particularly in memory bandwidth capabilities 3.

The technical gap is substantial. SK Hynix developed the first HBM chip in 2014 and has maintained technological leadership through multiple generations, while Chinese companies are still catching up due to U.S. export restrictions 1 2.

2️⃣ Technical replacement of HBM presents formidable engineering challenges

Huawei’s reported breakthrough faces significant technical hurdles, as HBM’s performance advantages stem from fundamental architectural innovations that are difficult to replicate.

HBM achieves its superiority through vertical stacking of up to eight DRAM dies and a 1024-bit data bus, compared to traditional GDDR memory’s 32-bit bus. This enables memory bandwidth of up to 4096 bits in GPU configurations 4.