{
  "id": 135602,
  "title": "Top Huawei chip scientist opens up on strategy, ‘blind arrogance’ and his war-hero mindset",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/04/top-huawei-chip-scientist-opens-up-on-strategy-blind-arrogance-and-135602",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-08-04T14:29:31.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "SCMP Tech",
    "slug": "scmp-tech",
    "url": "https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3362960/top-huawei-chip-scientist-opens-strategy-blind-arrogance-and-his-war-hero-mindset"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "When Liao Heng began working at Huawei Technologies' chip-design unit in 2016, he harboured doubts about China's capability to produce advanced semiconductors. A child prodigy who graduated from Tsinghua University in 1987 and later studied at Princeton, Liao had spent a decade abroad, witnessing the decline of American chip start-ups. He observed a \"blind arrogance\" among Western firms that he believed led to their innovation. However, his views changed dramatically after experiencing Huawei's efficient execution firsthand. \"Reality taught me a quick lesson,\" Liao stated in a recent business podcast. The chip division, HiSilicon, completed designs for multiple chips annually without a single failure in mass production. Today, as the chief scientist and architect behind Huawei's Ascend AI processors, Liao is at the forefront of China's pursuit of technological self-reliance. In a rare interview with a mainland news outlet, Liao revealed how he brought Silicon Valley expertise back to China and navigated US sanctions, all while building a self-sustaining AI computing infrastructure. Transitioning from pre-sanction to post-sanction Ascend processors, Huawei has emerged as a significant alternative to Nvidia's chips. Facing EUV lithography equipment shortages, Huawei employed system architecture, stacked dies, optoelectronic interconnects, and its open-source Compute Architecture for Neural Networks (CANN) toolkit to create interconnected \"supernodes\". These innovations resulted in the Tau Scaling Law, a design framework that could achieve transistor densities comparable to a 1.4-nanometre process by 2031. Despite technical gaps, Liao highlighted the country's energy advantage and system-level innovation as key factors that could propel China ahead in semiconductors.",
  "summary": "When Liao Heng joined Huawei Technologies’ chip-design unit in 2016, he was sceptical about whether China could ever build world-class semiconductors. A former child prodigy who entered Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University in 1987 at age 14 before moving to Princeton University for postdoctoral research, Liao had spent over a decade in the United States watching what he described as a “long…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 3,
    "also_reported_by": [
      {
        "outlet": "Techmeme",
        "title": "In a rare interview, Huawei chip scientist Liao Heng warns Western chip companies will eventually face physical chip limits and talks Huawei's Tau Scaling Law (Bloomberg)",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/04/in-a-rare-interview-huawei-chip-scientist-liao-heng-warns-western",
        "published": "2026-08-04T10:50:01.000Z"
      },
      {
        "outlet": "South China Morning Post",
        "title": "Top Huawei chip scientist opens up on strategy, ‘blind arrogance’ and his war-hero mindset",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/04/top-huawei-chip-scientist-opens-up-on-strategy-blind-arrogance-and",
        "published": "2026-08-04T14:29:31.000Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}