Although Chinese tech giant Huawei faces the dual operational pressure of Sino-US trade war and an investigation of its CFO, the company continues to accelerate the development of own customized wafers and aims to release a variety of SSD (solid-state drive) and other high-speed AI (Artificial Intelligence) and HPC (high-performance computing) networks for the data center before the end of 2018, the China Times reported on December 26. Huawei will increase the self-sufficiency rate of the chips and adopt the advanced processes such as 16 nm and 7 nm largely. The wafer foundry leader TSMC will directly benefit from Huawei’s move and take orders from the company next year, which makes Huawei the second biggest client of TSMC. For TSMC, Huawei will have a number of 7nm wafers launched next year, and Huawei is expected to be the first client to adopt TSMC’s EUV (extreme ultraviolet) 7+ nanometers and 5nm lithography technology. In recent years, Huawei has also invested in IC design factory Hisilicon to develop its own customized chips. In regards to the future smartphone shipment, the new generation of TSMC’s 7-nanometer Kirin 980 mobile phone chips has been mass-produced, and the 5G data processor chip is also ready for mass production. For Huawei, the series of Ascend chips can assist in the layout of AI applications, including training and reasoning in smart city, self-driving, and industrial 4.0 applications.