Huawei — AI supply-chain exposure

Huawei is China's telecom-and-compute champion, and increasingly the backbone of the country's domestic AI stack. Through its HiSilicon design arm it builds Ascend accelerators and lashes them together in CloudMatrix systems — meaning it produces not just the chip but the scale-up fabric and switch silicon that turn many chips into one machine. That vertical breadth is unusual; most players in the chain own a single layer, while Huawei reaches across several.

Its structural hook is political as much as technical. US export controls have walled China off from the leading foreign accelerators, and Huawei is the most credible domestic substitute — the default supplier for the world's second-largest pool of AI demand. That position hands it a captive market few rivals can contest at home, even as the same controls constrain the advanced manufacturing it can access abroad. The model places it near the centre because it occupies several links at once inside a large, insulated ecosystem.