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Huawei partners win big as China Telecom invests US$1.7 billion in 40,000 servers

China Telecom’s 40,000-server procurement puts Huawei’s Kunpeng ecosystem in focus as Beijing pushes for greater use of domestic hardware

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Huawei Technologies has emerged as a major winner of China Telecom's multibillion-dollar high-performance server procurement programme. Photo: Reuters
Howard Liuin Beijing
China Telecom has named the winners of a multibillion-dollar high-performance server procurement programme, handing a major victory to domestic CPU chip companies like Huawei Technologies as state firms rapidly replace US technology with domestic hardware.

The deal, which covers China Telecom’s needs for 2026 and 2027, called for 40,000 high-performance servers split into two packages, according to notices on its procurement platform on Tuesday. While the final price tag was not made public, tender documents put the budget ceiling at 11.55 billion yuan (US$1.7 billion).

Huawei’s expanding footprint was evident in the larger of the two packages, which covers 28,000 Arm-based servers tied to the company’s Kunpeng ecosystem. Unlike traditional x86 server chips dominated by US giants Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, Arm-based servers use a simplified chip architecture widely used in mobile devices.

While Huawei did not bid on the contract itself, the six winning companies were all publicly linked to the Kunpeng ecosystem, although the notices did not disclose the specific processors used in their bids. Such arrangements permitted Huawei to quietly capture major chunks of the government procurement market without its name showing up on the official supplier list.

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