Liao Heng, a Huawei Fellow and the company’s Lead Semiconductor Scientist, recently made a public appearance, where he voiced his admiration for Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, praising his boldness in venturing into unexplored realms. Using the disparity in redundant computing power between NVIDIA and Ascend chips as a case in point, Liao highlighted that Huawei refrained from blindly chasing enhancements in individual hardware metrics. Instead, the company leveraged full-stack system collaboration advantages to compensate for the hardware limitations of individual chips.

Liao drew an analogy between the semiconductor industry chain and an 18-story pagoda, underscoring that iterations in the foundational hardware layers are both costly and time-intensive, whereas software iterations at the upper echelons occur at a much faster pace. He emphasized that the fundamental strategy should be to minimize trial and error at the lower layers and expedite iterations at the upper layers, utilizing rapid software trial and error to retroactively guide and refine the hardware R&D trajectory.

Furthermore, Liao noted that the semiconductor sector is currently facing a scarcity of composite talents who possess the ability to vertically integrate multiple technological strata. He attributed Huawei’s breakthrough in computing power chips to this cross-layer collaborative approach.