Intel’s China Problem Just Got A Lot Worse

Huawei unveiled its first desktop computer running its own HarmonyOS operating system on Thursday, a machine with no Intel or Qualcomm chip and no Windows, which the South China Morning Post reported is 100% domestically made.

The Qingyun HM650 made its debut at the HarmonyOS Office Industry Summit in Wuhan, where Zhu Dongdong, president of Huawei’s tablet and PC product line, laid out the specs. It runs on Huawei’s Kirin X90, a 10-core, 20-thread processor rated at 40 watts, well under the 65 to 125 watts typical of desktop processors, with Huawei’s Maleoon 910 graphics, and carries what the company calls a “100% localization certification.” Huawei said tighter integration of its hardware and software lifts overall system performance by 15%.

The machine ships with an enterprise edition of HarmonyOS and a dedicated key for Huawei’s Celia AI assistant. Huawei is pitching it to finance, enterprise and energy customers, and gave no price or sale date.

No Intel, no Qualcomm: Huawei unveils desktop built entirely with China-made components: SCMP.

Goodbye China market

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 5, 2026

Huawei said at the summit that cumulative shipments of HarmonyOS computers have passed one million units. The company shipped 141,000 HarmonyOS PCs in all of 2025, according to figures cited by TechRadar in March.

Forced Out Of Wintel

In May 2024, Washington revoked the export licenses that let Intel and Qualcomm sell chips to Huawei, which had used Intel’s Core processors in most of its consumer laptops. Huawei’s license to put Microsoft Windows on its PCs expired in March 2025.

Huawei launched its first HarmonyOS laptops two months later. At a July briefing in Beijing, Zhu said the lineup now runs from the MateBook 14 to the 18-inch MateBook Fold, with the Qingyun line for government and business, and that native HarmonyOS PC apps had grown from about 1,000 at launch to more than 19,000.

Huawei had sold desktops without Intel inside before. Its earlier Qingyun machines ran Kirin chips on Chinese Linux distributions, as Tom’s Hardware reported. The HM650 is the first to run Huawei’s own operating system, which passed a Level II “secure and reliable” certification from China’s national information security evaluation center when Huawei showed the desktop in September, IT Home reported.

When TechInsights tore down the Kirin X90 in last year’s MateBook Fold, it found the chip was built on SMIC’s 7nm (N+2) process, the same node that first appeared in the Mate 60 Pro in August 2023, rather than the rumored 5nm. The firm said SMIC’s 5nm process remained elusive and that a Huawei stuck at 7nm is “multiple generations behind” the leading chipmakers.

As we noted in May, Huawei’s answer is what it calls a Tau scaling law: its semiconductor chief, He Tingbo, laid out a “LogicFolding” architecture meant to cut signal delay and raise transistor density, with 1.4nm chips targeted by 2031. SMIC shares jumped more than 18% to a record on the news.

‘Safe and Reliable’

Beijing has ordered government agencies and party organs above the township level to buy “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems, as we reported seemingly eons and epochs ago in March 2024, steering them away from Intel, AMD and Windows. The approved list, all Chinese, is kept by the China Information Technology Security Evaluation Center, which certified the Kirin X90 in March 2025. State-owned enterprises were reportedly told to finish switching to domestic suppliers by 2027.

China was Intel’s largest market in 2023, accounting for 27% of its $54 billion in sales. Qualcomm says in its fiscal 2025 annual report that it derives “a significant portion” of its revenue from Chinese device makers, that it expects no further product revenue from Huawei, and that some of its Chinese customers have developed their own chips.

Huawei is working on the machines that make the chips, too. As we reported in September, it has taken the coordinating role in China’s push to build its own DUV lithography tools, funding lens and light-source suppliers through its venture arms, while China’s two biggest memory makers, CXMT and YMTC, stockpiled enough ASML equipment to cover about three years of expansion.