New leak says Huawei's Kirin 9000s chips were actually made my TSMC

The launch of the 5G-enabled Kirin 9000s chips with the Huawei Mate 60 Pro has confused everyone, including the US government, considering SMIC was light years behind the competition. However, a recent report from Twitter leaker @RGcloudS suggests that SMIC might not have manufactured Huawei’s Kirin 9000s chips after all.

Why is the Kirin 9000s a big deal?

To put things into perspective, when the US government first banned Huawei from conducting business with American companies, it severely impacted the company’s smartphone business since it couldn’t procure chips from Samsung or TSMC. Although the US government did eventually allow Huawei to purchase chips from Qualcomm, particularly the non-5G Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, the company shifted its focus to collaborating with SMIC.

However, when the company launched the Kirin 9000s, it took the world by storm because it used the much newer 7nm node process and could also access 5G services in the country. However, if this were true, it implies that SMIC may have violated US sanctions, as the Dutch company ASML is the sole manufacturer of the EUV machines.

SMIC didn’t manufacture the Kirin 9000s?

According to @RGcloudS, the teardown images of the Huawei Mate 60 Pro reveal a date stamp indicating that the Kirin 9000s was manufactured in the 35th week of 2020 (August 24th-30th). This suggests that the Kirin 9000s is, in fact, a rebranded version of the 5nm Kirin 9000, originally produced by TSMC three years ago rather than by SMIC. Additionally, the leaker proposes that Huawei might have stockpiled a substantial 142 million units of Kirin 9000E and Kirin 9000 5G chipsets within a three-month timeframe.

“It doesn’t matter how talented you are. You can’t produce 7nm with a legacy 1980 DUV machine, multiple steps of stacking to create compared to EUV,” said RGcloudS.

If proven true, this speculation would challenge previous reports that suggested the Kirin 9000s chip was not a genuine 7nm chip but was using SMIC’s antiquated 14nm node process with performance enhancements. However, it is important to note that @RGcloudS has no proven track record of such leaks.