Huawei Claims Fully Chinese-Made PC as Beijing Pushes Away From Wintel Hardware

Last week Huawei launched a desktop computer called the Qingyun HM650 and said that every part inside it was made in China. The machine is built around the company's own Kirin X90 processor, a ten-core, 20-thread chip with a clock speed of 2.3 GHz. It runs a newly developed enterprise edition of HarmonyOS, the operating system Huawei created to end its dependence on Android, and which it intends to put on most of the devices it makes.

The launch comes with a customer attached. One Chinese government agency has reportedly signed up for 600 of the machines. That is a modest number on its face, but it is not a sign that the HM650 is a curiosity. Beijing has ordered all government entities to move away from Wintel machines, meaning PCs built on Windows and Intel-style hardware, and toward local alternatives. A single agency's order looks like the early edge of a much larger purchasing shift.

The central claim comes with a caveat. Huawei has reportedly said local companies manufactured 100 percent of the components in the HM650. It is unclear, though, whether all of those components also use Chinese designs. The Register flags that gap because many non-Chinese companies continue to run factories in China, so a part made there is not necessarily a part designed there.

Even if some of the content is not entirely Chinese, the machine's debut is bad news for Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. All three are already struggling as the PC market shrinks under the rising cost of memory. China's government is an enormous buyer, and being shut out of bidding for its business is unlikely to help them.

The same roundup carried several other items from across the region. Japan's government announced emergency funding on Friday to help local organizations strengthen their cyber-defences. The ¥10 billion package, about $63 million, follows a wave of cyberattacks that disrupted railways, retailers, KFC's logistics provider, and cloud computing operators. It aims to help government agencies use AI to get infosec basics right, and to build tools that let the National Cybersecurity Office aggregate information about attacks. Some of the money will support victims.

Lenovo is looking for a new head of its Asia-Pacific operations after moving Amar Babu to Motorola, where he becomes mobile business group general manager and global president. He led the region for more than five years, and Lenovo credited him with making it a more balanced and diversified business and a key growth engine. The company said Asia-Pacific kept its number one PC position, that Motorola reached nearly 9 percent market share in India and is the number two smartphone OEM in Japan, and that advanced services now make up over 50 percent of its solutions and services mix. No successor has been named.

Vietnam announced its first domestically designed security chip, a 28-nanometer device that reportedly builds encryption algorithms into the silicon. It is already used in secure USB storage devices that hold information for government and defense agencies and the Communist Party. Hanoi hopes to use it to secure the national digital signature certification system and critical infrastructure in electricity, water, oil and gas, and telecommunications. The government says the chip needs more testing before it will be trusted with state secrets, but called it an important step toward sovereign security capabilities.

Finally, Apple said on its Q4 earnings call that it has made its biggest-ever education sale of Macs, to the Philippines. CEO John Ternus said the company sold 172,000 MacBook Neos to the country's Department of Education, which will deploy them to teachers and staff. For the HM650, the thing to watch is whether independent scrutiny confirms the all-Chinese claim, and whether more agencies follow that first order of 600.