Huawei has released the first phone in its flagship Pura series that runs only on its own HarmonyOS Next operating system. It also came with an AI assistant that the company says can deal with humanlike “emotions” with the help of DeepSeek.
Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, held a live stream to showcase the new Pura X, a bi-fold smartphone with a bigger screen. This is the first phone in the Pura series to run fully on Harmony, including the core infrastructure.
He explained that the system is trained on Huawei’s in-house Pangu large language model and also enhanced by Chinese startup DeepSeek’s popular AI model. It runs on the locally developed Ascend computing platform. Yu called it China’s answer to Nvidia.
Richard Yu said, “We have trained our AI assistant for millions of hours with our large language models and put that intelligence on the device for the first time to make it really like a real human that can interact naturally with conversations with different emotions and detect users’ mood.”
In addition, it is the first phone in Huawei’s top line to come with Harmony Intelligence, the company’s version of Apple Intelligence. It has now joined DeepSeek’s competion with Western technology.
Huawei’s plans to reduce overreliance on US companies
Huawei plans to replace Google’s Android OS on all of its phones and Windows OS on all of its PCs with HarmonyOS Next. Chinese automakers like Chery Automobile and Seres Automobile are also using HarmonyOS Next for their electric cars. Richard Yu said that the first laptop running HarmonyOS will come out in May of this year.
In addition, the company wants to grow its ecosystem of developers so that more apps can run on its Huawei Mobile Services (HMS). This will take the place of Google Mobile Services (GMS) and the famous Google Maps and Gmail apps.
Huawei said that some well-known companies have already joined Huawei AppGallery. These companies include Emirates, the airline, and the ride-hailing and food delivery service, Grab.
Chinese apps like Xiaohongshu (English: RedNote), Bilibili (a video-sharing app), JD.com (a big e-commerce site), KingSoft (a Chinese version of Microsoft Office), and Baidu (a search engine) are all supporting AppGallery and adding their apps to it.
As the US looks to be more independent, it looks like China is doing the same, especially with its technology.
Nvidia dominance is no longer assured
The new Huawei Ascend 910C processors work better than older models, showing that the company is making progress in making better AI chips. The output yield of the Ascend chips has gone up by almost 40%, which is twice as much as it was a year ago.
The tech entity wants to reach 60%, which is the business standard. Thanks to the higher yield, Huawei’s production of AI chips is now profitable for the first time.
According to reports, Huawei plans to make 300,000 910B chips and 100,000 910C processors this year. In 2024, only 200,000 910B were made, and no 910C were made in large quantities. This is a big step toward China’s goal of being fully AI-independent for advanced chip production.
I am extremely proud to share that my new report "DeepSeek, Huawei, Export Controls, and the Future of the U.S.-China AI Race" has just been published by CSIS! This report is chock full of previously not-public information and analysis connecting dozens of data points to assess… pic.twitter.com/OYH0eol65L
— Gregory C. Allen (@Gregory_C_Allen) March 7, 2025
Gregory Allen, Director of the Wadhwani AI Center at CSIS, says that a possible partnership between Huawei, a Chinese tech giant, and DeepSeek, an AI company, could be a real long-term threat to Nvidia. This possible competition could change the AI business in a big way, especially since China wants to be self-sufficient in technology.
Allen recently spoke to Bloomberg about the alliance’s strategic importance. He said that Nvidia should be most worried about Huawei using DeepSeek’s AI knowledge. The partnership aims to create a different, cheaper chip environment that can compete with Nvidia’s CUDA software moat.
DeepSeek initially used Nvidia’s H800 GPUs to train its R1 model, but now Huawei is offering DeepSeek-optimized inference support for its Ascend AI GPUs, so the company doesn’t have to rely on Western companies as much.
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