Huawei’s Chip Queen Shapes Tech Future: 20 Years On

He Tingbo took charge of Huawei’s chip development in 2003. She received an annual budget of $400 million and a mission that would place her at the center of China’s most significant technology effort.

Over two decades, He became one of Huawei’s most important executives and a symbol of China’s determination to survive US sanctions and build a self-reliant semiconductor business.

She is president of Huawei’s semiconductor business and director of its Science Committee. She is also one of only two women on Huawei’s 17-member board.

Her latest public appearance, a keynote address titled “New Semiconductor Path in Practice” at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems in Shanghai, places her at the center of a global debate over what comes after Moore’s Law.

For decades, chip progress was driven by shrinking transistors and packing more of them onto a single chip. This made computers faster, cheaper, and more energy efficient. But as semiconductor scaling approaches lithographic and atomic limits, Moore’s Law has become less effective, forcing the industry to find new ways to boost performance.

US sanctions beginning in 2019 cut Huawei off from key foreign chip technologies and leading-edge manufacturing, threatening its businesses from smartphones to telecommunications equipment.

New US curbs subsequently put many of Huawei’s domestic partners and competitors in a similar predicament. This has increased the importance of post-Moore’s Law semiconductor technologies.

On Monday, He introduced what Huawei calls the Tau Scaling Law. It is a principle the Chinese technology company says can guide chip development as Moore’s Law weakens.

Huawei said its team has spent the past six years applying it and has mass-produced 381 chips based on the approach. The principle argues that the semiconductor industry should shift its focus from shrinking transistors to speeding up transmission speeds across devices, circuits, chips, and computing systems.

He’s career has largely tracked Huawei’s global rise, struggle following US sanctions, and then a rebirth as the core driver of China’s mission to become a high-tech juggernaut.

Born in 1969 in Changsha in Hunan province, she joined Huawei in 1996 as an engineer after earning a dual bachelor’s degree in semiconductor physics and communication engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

In 2004, the company formally established HiSilicon, its chip design unit, which He helped build from a small internal department into one of the world’s broadest semiconductor operations.

Under her leadership, Huawei developed capabilities across system-on-chip design, optoelectronics, and advanced packaging. The portfolio eventually spanned smartphones, artificial intelligence, general-purpose processors, telecommunications, networking, and consumer electronics, playing a significant part in Huawei’s 2025 revenue of 880.9 billion yuan ($130 billion).

After sanctions hit, He became closely associated with Huawei’s internal survival effort. In a widely circulated 2019 letter to HiSilicon employees, she said the unit was “building a backup lifeline for Huawei and for the whole country.”