SAN FRANCISCO ¨C The surprise arrest of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies Co., has thrust the company into a political firestorm and deepened a core threat: that more and more countries will blacklist its switches, routers and phones out of growing concern that they could be hijacked by foreign spies.
Yet inside Huawei¡¯s Shenzhen headquarters, a secretive group of engineers is toiling away heedless to such risks. They are working on what is next ¡ª a raft of artificial intelligence, cloud-computing and chip technology crucial to China¡¯s national priorities and Huawei¡¯s future. As the trade war drags on, China¡¯s government has pushed to create an industry that is less dependent on cutting-edge U.S. semiconductors and software.
Meng¡¯s detention, far from slowing these ambitions, will instead speed the fall of this ¡°silicon curtain,¡± when the U.S. and China will no longer provide chips to one another, Gus Richard, a Northland Capital Markets analyst, wrote in a recent report. ¡°Huawei is the icon of the rise of China industrial power,¡± he wrote.
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