Huawei Reportedly Building AI Memory to Challenge HBM

Huawei is reportedly working on a new kind of AI-focused memory that could act as an alternative to high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a critical component currently dominated by Western suppliers.

If successful, this move could reduce China’s reliance on restricted imports while pushing Huawei deeper into the AI hardware race.

According to Chinese media, Huawei is developing what is described as an AI SSD, a solid-state drive specifically tuned for datacenter workloads. The claim is that unlike traditional HBM, this solution won’t face capacity limitations and could provide significant performance boosts for AI training and inference. While no official technical details have been shared, the project reflects Huawei’s ongoing attempts to sidestep geopolitical restrictions that have limited access to advanced memory solutions.

In parallel, Huawei has also introduced a Unified Cache Manager (UCM) software suite. UCM allows large language models (LLMs) to use memory more efficiently across HBM, standard DRAM, and SSDs, effectively stretching existing hardware further. This hybrid approach highlights Huawei’s strategy: finding creative ways to bypass barriers while continuing to build its AI stack.

Although Huawei still lags behind giants like NVIDIA in AI acceleration, the company’s rapid pace of hardware and software innovation is starting to narrow the gap. Whether the so-called AI SSD can truly replace HBM remains uncertain, but the fact that Huawei is tackling the problem head-on shows how seriously China is betting on homegrown solutions to secure its AI future.