- Huawei’s new Kirin 9050 Pro is being called its “most powerful” all-Chinese chip tech giant has ever made
- Huawei claims a 55% density gain by “folding” its chip in half and stacking it instead of shrinking the actual die
- The chip still uses US hardware and foreign technology to manufacture, including ASML scanners and pre-2022 Applied Materials and Lam Research equipment
Huawei has introduced the Kirin 9050 Pro, a mobile processor that it says is completely free of American technology.
The chip powers the Mate XT 2, the third device in the company’s trifold line, which starts at 19,999 yuan (~$2,980) and will go on sale in China on September 12, 2026.
Those South China Morning Post noted that Huawei is reducing reliance on advanced foreign semiconductor equipment, and this could be what the state-backed AI and chip giant wanted to emphasize above all, even if it refused to mention sanctions anywhere in its own press materials.
Latest Videos FromTechRadar
An impressive SoC that continues to indicate a shrinking technology gap
Richard Yu, president of Huawei’s consumer business group, said on stage that the Kirin 9050 Pro is the “most powerful Kirin chip ever” and, based on the performance numbers, a 42% overall improvement over the last gen Mate XTs’ Kirin 9020.
At the chip level, it claims 24% higher peak single-core and 52% better multi-core throughput against the Kirin 9030 Pro, plus a 142% jump in graphics rendering. The nine-core LinxiCore CPU peaks at 3.1GHz, the Maleoon GPU adds hardware ray tracing, and the Da Vinci NPU runs a 30-billion-parameter blend-of-expert model on device.
The performance numbers alone aren’t the only interesting thing about Huawei’s new silicon offering; the Kirin 9050 Pro is the first commercial silicon built on LogicFolding, a technique Huawei semiconductor chief He Tingbo presented at the IEEE ISCAS in Shanghai in May and expanded in a signed paper.
Rather than shrinking transistors, LogicFolding splits the logic across two active silicon layers bonded face to face with about 50 million vertical connections at a pitch of about 1.5 micrometers. Because signals travel shorter distances, Huawei says it could reduce operating voltage while increasing density.
However, all these numbers (including performance) come directly from Huawei, without independent verification or peer-reviewed studies. More interestingly, while the Kirin is significantly less dependent on US or Western tech, it doesn’t completely remove them from the equation, and you still have to look at the bill of materials for receipt.
Huawei has not announced a process node for the Kirin 9050 Pro, and that silence was in more ways than one. SemiAnalysis demolished the predecessor in June 2026 and found SMIC’s third-generation 7nm process, N+3, reached about 113 million transistors per square millimeter without extreme ultraviolet lithography anywhere in the flow.
SMIC’s process, however, still uses ASML immersion scanners. Bloomberg reported in 2024 that SMIC built the previous Kirin 9000s using equipment purchased from Applied Materials and Lam Research before the October 2022 export rules closed that door, and the same is still at play here.
Still, Huawei has come a long way since its phones were declared America-free seven years ago. A UBS and Fomalhaut Techno Solutions analysis seen by Wall Street Journal In late 2019, the Mate 30 Pro was found to contain no American parts, and Huawei cybersecurity officer John Suffolk told the paper that “all of our 5G is now America-free.” The Kirin 990 in that phone, however, was manufactured by TSMC on an EUV node.
Huawei’s approach, supported by the Chinese state, to essentially free itself from US influence on the manufacturing end of the spectrum remains more of an ongoing struggle than it has already achieved, even as it continues to push in certain disciplines and erode a performance gap that industry players previously thought would last years longer than it is now projected.
Follow TechRadar on Google News in the add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews and opinion in your feeds.