Huawei HiSilicon Employees Leaving Amid U.S. Embargo

Due to the U.S. government has tightened its sanctions against the Chinese manufacturer Huawei, more and more employees of the chip division HiSilicon are leaving the “sinking ship“. Huawei can currently hardly build its own chips anyway.

As the Taiwanese industry service DigiTimes reports, Huawei’s chipmaker HiSilicon is practically facing the abyss. Many developers have already left the Chinese giant’s department, which specializes in chip development, it is said. This mainly relates to the employees working for Huawei HiSilicon in Taiwan, HiSilicon team is now shrinking, said Digitimes.

Developers were recruited with great effort, now they are fleeing

According to the report, HiSilicon employees began to migrate in early 2020 as the US cracked down on Huawei. Both middle and senior HiSilicon employees are about to leave the company. They had previously been poached by other chip manufacturers at great expense and expense.

Now the previous Huawei employees are becoming attractive targets for the headhunters of the competition who want to tap into their talents for their own products. Due to the new restrictions imposed by the US Commerce Department, which in the meantime even prohibits the delivery of chips and other products if machines or technologies from US suppliers are used in their development and manufacture, Huawei’s options are dwindling more and more.

Deliveries of the Taiwanese CPU and modem supplier MediaTek could soon be prevented by the US sanctions. MediaTek has its SoCs such as Qualcomm and various other providers – and until recently Huawei itself – produced by the contract manufacturer TSMC. Because of the overwhelming power of American providers of technologies for chip design and manufacturing, US machines and software are of course primarily used.

Huawei’s massive difficulties are currently causing fundamental upheaval in the industry, also because various orders from Huawei are breaking away from the suppliers. In the smartphone market, especially Chinese manufacturers such as ZTE, Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi are likely to snatch the market shares of Huawei and its subsidiaries. Qualcomm and MediaTek are likely to step in on a broad front as chip suppliers for the other manufacturers.