Huawei’s newest data center processor, the Kunpeng 930, has reignited debate over just how far behind the company remains in chip technology. A recent teardown suggests the chip is built using TSMC’s 5nm (N5) process, a technology that first entered mass production in 2020.
Meanwhile, the rest of the semiconductor industry is already pushing into N3 and preparing for N2 nodes.
The discovery comes from an enthusiast on X (formerly Twitter) who claims to have purchased a second-hand Kunpeng 930 from a Chinese marketplace and analyzed it with an electron microscope. The chip’s SRAM modules, according to the analysis, align with the characteristics of TSMC’s N5 process. While this implies Huawei is still using older manufacturing methods, the reality is nuanced: the density of N5 SRAM cells is nearly identical to those built with N3, meaning Huawei’s memory design may not be significantly disadvantaged in terms of space efficiency.
The Kunpeng 930 was originally expected to succeed the Kunpeng 920 back in 2021, but U.S. sanctions blocking Huawei’s access to advanced TSMC fabrication delayed the project. The Kunpeng 920, launched in 2019, was built on 7nm technology and based on Arm architecture. Since then, Huawei’s chip ambitions have been largely constrained by geopolitics rather than engineering capability.
Benchmarks that surfaced last year indicated the Kunpeng 930 performs roughly on par with AMD processors from around 2020 – highlighting the impact of sanctions. While the chip appears to have been packaged in late 2024, it is still unclear whether Huawei produced it independently or leveraged older TSMC designs. For now, the Kunpeng 930 reflects both Huawei’s resilience in keeping its server chip line alive and the heavy toll that export restrictions continue to impose on China’s semiconductor progress.