When Washington began cutting Huawei off from leading-edge foundries and design tools in 2019, He Tingbo penned a defiant letter to staff declaring that the backup chips her team had spent years quietly building would all be pressed into service overnight.
Dubbed China's “chip queen,” He has led Huawei's semiconductor development since 2003, spearheading progress across system-on-chip design, optoelectronics, and advanced packaging. Today, Huawei has scaled its capabilities for Kirin smartphone processors, Ascend AI hardware, Kunpeng server processors, and semiconductors for 5G networks and antennas. The Shenzhen-based behemoth plans an Atlas 950 SuperPoD scaling to 8,192 Ascend 950DT processors, alongside an Atlas 950 SuperCluster exceeding 520,000 chips. In May, He also unveiled Huawei’s alternative to Moore’s Law—the observation that a microchip’s transistors double roughly every two years—called the Tau Scaling Law, which instead focuses on speed via increased architectural efficiency throughout a hardware stack.
As the company leads China’s efforts to shrug off U.S. chip dependency, He has emerged as a central figure for national security. “We believe that openness and collaboration are key to driving ongoing progress in the semiconductor industry,” He tells TIME. “No single company can independently find all the answers along the path of semiconductor evolution.