Huawei is focusing on its budding cloud business, which still has access to US chips despite the sanctions against the company, to secure its survival.
The Chinese group’s cloud computing business, which sells computing power and storage to companies, including giving them access to AI, is far behind Alibaba and Tencent, the market leaders in China. But it is growing rapidly and in January Huawei put the unit on an equal footing with its smartphones and telecoms equipment businesses.
A person at a Chinese supplier to Huawei said the cloud business was key to Huawei stabilising in its domestic market because Beijing would increasingly support the company through public cloud contracts.