Using innovation to propel business success

Innovation is not a one-way street. For a company to truly innovate in its field, it must be willing to make targeted investments that push the boundaries of technology, benefiting both customers and partners.

At the same time, major players in any sector must be willing to invest in their wider customer communities and help set standards in collaboration with competitors. This is the key to a healthy, innovative sector, especially in the fast-moving world of technology.

Huawei is a company that understands this mindset well. The technology giant is a firm supporter of both targeted innovation and the open source community.

A testament to Huawei’s hands-on involvement in the open source ecosystem is its longstanding major involvement in open source projects and organizations. For example, Huawei is a founder member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a platinum member of the OpenInfra Foundation, and a premier member of the Pytorch Foundation, among many peer organizations.

Overall, the firm is also the number one contributor to Kubernetes code in Asia, as well as the number one Kubernetes project maintainer across the region.

Its contributions to open source don’t end at stewardship, however. For many years, Huawei has also donated significant software to open source foundations to share with the wider community.

For example, throughout 2020 and 2021, Huawei donated the code for its device operating system OpenHarmony to the OpenAtom Foundation, China’s first open source foundation, and one in which Huawei is a founder member. The same foundation hosts the Linux distribution openEuler, before it formally gifted the distro to the foundation in 2021.

Across enterprise environments, openEuler is used in servers, edge computing, cloud computing, and other digital devices. In all, it has now been installed on over 10 million installations by the end of 2024. In addition, openEuler has reached more than 3.85 million downloads worldwide, covering 155 countries and regions and over 2,000 cities.

In combination with work from Huawei itself, the more than 8,100 contributors in the OpenHarmony open source community added 10 million lines to OpenHarmony’s source code throughout 2024. OpenHarmony 6.0 was released on September 27, 2025, and over 1 billion devices have been powered by OpenHarmony so far.

“Sharing is indeed a form of openness, and I believe that openness is truly the path we must steadfastly follow for innovation in the future,” said one inventor representative in a Huawei video related to the Huawei Innovation and Intellectual Property (IP) Forum 2025.

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At the same time, Huawei firmly backs the right for every company to develop extensive IP portfolios.

In just the past few decades, the company has become a major IP publisher across a wide range of sectors and technologies. Indeed, Huawei holds more than 150,000 active patents around the world, with over 29,000 of these in the US, 19,000 in Europe, and 50,000 in China.

At its recent Innovation and IP Forum, the organization celebrated the theme of ‘Advancing Innovation with Openness’. Attendees included international tech experts and marked its role as a key player in the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) ecosystem.

Overall, Huawei published 6,600 PCT applications in 2024 alone. These breakthroughs, in both the open source and proprietary spaces, didn’t just happen overnight. They were the fruit of years of labour by Huawei researchers, backed by long-term investment.

Targeted R&D investment

Indeed, one of Huawei’s chief strengths for decades has been its commitment to research and development. Its R&D spending has always equaled more than 10% of its annual revenue, and over the past decade, its total R&D spending has exceeded CNY 1.249 trillion ($175.5 billion).

Additionally, over half (54.1%) of the organization’s employees work in R&D, as of 31 December 2024. In 2019, Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei stated that Huawei’s status as a privately held company is key to its R&D success, as it can focus more on progress than its “balance sheets”.

“What matters more to Huawei is the future industry structure,” he said. “Our decision-making system is different from public companies. It is very simple, and we are working hard to make the information society a reality.”

Huawei’s Top 10 Inventions award is an internal celebration of its R&D prowess, shining a light on the most notable advances and patents. In its most recent list, the firm celebrated specific leaps forward across its software and hardware, including breakthroughs that improve its SuperPod and 5G platforms.

The first of these to note is the Scale-Up Ultra-Large-Scale SuperPoD Computing Platform, which brings together hundreds or even thousands of AI chips to work on a single workload together.

“In the previous generation of computers, what we did was like building ‘bungalows’," said an inventor representative of the team behind the SuperPoD platform.

“In this generation, we are constructing skyscrapers instead. We integrate the 384 supernodes into the highest ‘building’ in the world.”

These chips are connected by over 7,000 high-bandwidth optical modules, themselves linked together through 3,000 buses. It’s a significant step towards meeting the intense parallel processing demands of large AI models, as well as the data and storage demands of at-scale AI deployment.

The representative added that the low latency and high throughput achievable through the new architecture have helped Huawei to answer user queries more quickly, as well as without any downtime or delays during peak access periods.

A similar breakthrough has been made in Ascend-aware Inference Acceleration via Mathematical Innovation.

This math-based methodology dramatically improves the degree to which Huawei Ascend chips can be optimized for the purposes of training large language models (LLMs) and other deep learning models.

Another major innovation on the list is Huawei’s Fixed 5G-Advanced – 50G PON technology, the first of its kind deployed commercially, which opens the door to 50Gbit/sec downstream speeds across fixed access 5G. It’s a potential game-changer for businesses, enhanced by other innovations in Huawei’s proprietary tech stack.

GigaGreen RAN, another winning project that sees a proprietary multi-band sharing method used to reduce energy usage in radio mast technology by as much as 30%. Overall, the technology is estimated to improve customer 5G network experience by 20%, with interference reduced by 25 dB to give network operators more control over precise spectrum use and allocation.

Throughout its decades-long history, Huawei has charted a steady course of sustainable innovation. Despite its expansive proprietary development, it has not forgotten the international advantages of giving back to the open source community and leaning on principles of openness to drive new success and technological advances.