Huawei’s Plan for the U.S. Blacklisting? Hoarding
- Paul Thurrott
- Jun 05, 2020
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A new report claims that Huawei has stockpiled up to two years’ worth of critical U.S.-based chipsets and components.
According to Nikkei Asian Review, the stockpiling designed to protect Huawei during a unilateral crackdown of the company by the U.S. government. It includes the “most essential components” it will need—mostly Intel and AMD chipsets for servers and Xilinx programmable chips—for its operations to last between one and a half and two years. Separately, we know that Huawei was also stockpiling NAND flash memory chips from Kioxia, Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix.
This stockpiling began at the end of 2018, the report claims, right after Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada. Huawei “is preparing stocks for wartime,” one of Nikkei’s sources told the publication.
Huawei has acknowledged stockpiling hardware components in the wake of the most recent U.S. action, noting that it spent $23.45 billion in 2019 on the effort. But it has never specified which components it was buying up, nor the methods by which it does so. Nikkei says that the firm is obtaining the components through chip distributors and traders, and via its partners.