Huawei is positioning itself as a viable alternative to big US tech companies. Can it pull it off?

Huawei is, I was told last week at Connect 2026, a company of engineers run by engineers. Many of the top executives in the company have come up from an engineering background and it feels apparent in the highly technical announcements made at the conference.

Beneath the technological developments and breakthroughs, though, is a portfolio that many enterprise vendors could only dream of. Chips, networking, servers, and storage, Huawei has a finger in every pie (and that’s before we get anywhere near devices and, yes, cars).

Landing a whale of a client with DeepSeek

Huawei pulled off what, at first blush, appears to be something of a coup when it comes to big customers this month. DeepSeek, the open weight model that smashed onto the generative AI scene in 2025, announced it was swapping Nvidia AI chips for Huawei Ascend in its infrastructure.

There’s no doubt that this is a big deal – DeepSeek changed how people understood generative AI models work and how much they cost to run – but there’s another aspect at play.

Due to the US’s ongoing trade restrictions, there’s no fresh supply of advanced chips from Nvidia or AMD going into China, so DeepSeek had no choice but to turn to another supplier. With the US players off the board, the alternatives become quite limited.

Nevertheless, this offers an opportunity for Huawei to show what its data centre hardware can do. It may not find a market for Ascend, OceanStor, Atlas and the rest in the USA but there’s a big wide world out there full of markets that will be interested in a proven alternative.

In fact, there were many customer spokespeople from Asia and Europe speaking at the breakout sessions held throughout the two day conference in Shanghai, including French supermarket Auchan and Turkish investment bank İşbank Türkiye.

The battle of the SuperPods

Without wishing to drive the Nvidia comparisons too hard, it’s worth also looking at Huawei’s pride-of-place AI infrastructure, the SuperPod.

SuperPods are extremely large infrastructure platforms made up of multiple components acting together as a single system. They are designed for demanding AI and high performance computing (HPC) workloads.

When you enter SuperPod into your search engine of choice, you will find one other name making this type of technology and that’s Nvidia. This hasn’t gone unnoticed and many commenters have suggested that Huawei is gunning for Nvidia’s AI throne, both with SuperPods and its latest upcoming Ascend 970 and 980 chips.

Even Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, has remarked on Huawei’s growing presence in the AI market, saying in 2025 that Huawei’s “presence in AI is growing every single year”. He added that enterprise tech companies elsewhere shouldn’t assume the company won’t be a factor in the AI race.

Huawei isn’t going to take over the world overnight. I noticed that it wasn’t named in the technical specifications of LineShine, for example, and trade restrictions in the US keep it out of a large market. Once you get through the dense technical detail, though, what’s underneath is a capable company that has a real breadth of expertise, deep technical knowledge and a huge commitment to R&D.