Huawei Has About a Month Before It Runs Out of Smartphone Chips - Gizmodo

The Trump administration’s sanctions are hitting Huawei hard, and the Chinese tech giant now says it will run out of processors chips for its smartphones by September without access to U.S.

While Huawei’s own engineers design one of its most advanced processors, the Kirin chip, production is handled by contractors that rely on U.S.

As a result, he added, the company has “no chips and no supply” for its smartphones, which recently surpassed rival Samsung as the world’s top-selling brand for the first time with 55.8 million devices sold in Q2, according to the tech research firm Canalys.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the American chip company Qualcomm is lobbying U.S.

policymakers to ease sanctions and allow it to sell chips to Huawei for the production of their 5G phones.

The company argues that the export ban doesn’t just hurt Huawei: By cutting Qualcomm off from potential sales of essential components in Huawei’s device, the ban is essentially handing the market—worth as much as $8 billion annually—to foreign competitors like Samsung and Taiwan’s MediaTek.

The Commerce Department can grant licenses to individual businesses to circumvent the ban and sell to Huawei, which Qualcomm argues would generate billions of dollars in revenue for the company to put into its own development and create new technologies.