Huawei tells customers to find their own AI chip memory, effectively outsourcing procurement to the black market - The Decoder

Huawei offloading memory procurement onto end customers is a structural admission of capability loss, not a logistics workaround. Strip the HBM from an Ascend die and effective throughput drops by roughly 60 percent; training-cluster efficiency per watt falls below the commercial viability threshold. This is a physics problem, not a sourcing problem. The compliance exposure is the sharper blade: any customer pulling HBM through unauthorized channels is voluntarily entering export-control violation territory. Huawei retreats from supplier to information broker, severing legal liability while torching ecosystem trust in a single move. On the competitive front, Cambricon and Biren gain a 12-to-18-month substitution window, yet CXMT's HBM yield at 128-layer stacks remains below commercial grade, leaving the high-end gap unfilled for the foreseeable future. The 24-month trajectory points toward a fragmented chip-memory decoupling ecosystem in China's AI compute market. Gray-market component flows will surge, quality control will erode, and full-stack integration will collapse to fewer than three viable players. The black-market workaround does not solve the underlying physics; it merely externalizes the risk onto customers who lack the leverage to absorb it.