Huawei vs Xiaomi

Huawei and Qualcomm Sign AI and 5G Patent Deal

Despite trade tensions, Huawei and Qualcomm have signed a cross-licensing agreement covering patents related to AI and 5G technology. The deal, announced in late September 2026, aims to reduce legal disputes and foster innovation. Financial terms were not disclosed. This collaboration is significant as it could stabilize supply chains and set a precedent for tech cooperation amid geopolitical friction, potentially benefiting the broader mobile and AI industries.

• Huawei and Qualcomm signed a cross-licensing agreement for AI and 5G patents.
• The deal was announced in late September 2026.
• Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Notice on Rotating Chairman Tenure

Huawei has published a press release titled 'Notice on Rotating Chairman Tenure' dated Sep 30, 2026, indicating a change in the rotating chairman position.

Alibaba's T-Head AI Chips: Cloud Customers or Qwen Training?

Alibaba announced at its Apsara conference that its new Zhenwu V900 AI chip will enter mass production and go on sale in Q1 2027, two quarters earlier than planned. This follows Huawei's announcement of its Ascend 960DT chip being ready in Q1 2027. Both companies face high demand and limited supply for their chips. IDC data shows Nvidia holds 55% of China's server AI accelerator shipments, Huawei 20%, and T-Head 7%. Alibaba plans to train Qwen models with 5-10 trillion parameters, but has not disclosed which chips will be used, raising concerns about competition between internal model training and paying cloud customers for scarce chip capacity.

• Alibaba announced its Zhenwu V900 chip will enter mass production and go on sale in Q1 2027.
• Huawei announced its Ascend 960DT chip will be ready in Q1 2027, three quarters earlier than planned.
• IDC reported Nvidia held 55% of China's server AI accelerator shipments in 2025, Huawei 20%, and T-Head 7%.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Breaks 5 GHz Barrier

Qualcomm has announced two new flagship smartphone processors at its Snapdragon Summit 2026: the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. The Gen 6 is the first smartphone chip to reach 5 GHz clock speed on its prime cores, a milestone previously associated with PCs. The chip offers a 10% increase in compute performance or 37% better energy efficiency at the same performance, and a 35% faster Adreno GPU, enabled by a new 2nm manufacturing process, likely TSMC's N2P. The Extreme variant enhances the GPU with three matrix cores for AI-based gaming upscaling and frame generation, a feature Qualcomm calls 'Neural Fusion.' First devices featuring these chips are expected soon, with Xiaomi and Motorola among the first to announce models.

• Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 at its Snapdragon Summit 2026.
• The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 is the first smartphone chip to reach 5 GHz clock speed on its prime cores.
• The Gen 6 chip offers 10% more compute performance or 37% higher energy efficiency at the same performance compared to the previous generation.

Xiaomi MiMo-V2.6-Pro tops open-weight AI models

Chinese electronics giant Xiaomi released its MiMo-V2.6 series of open-weight AI models under the MIT license on Hugging Face. The flagship MiMo-V2.6-Pro scored 46 points on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, making it the highest-ranked open-weight model globally, surpassing GLM-5.3 and Kimi K3. It trails only proprietary models like Claude and GPT-6, ranking sixth overall. The model features a sparse mixture-of-experts architecture with 1.02 trillion total parameters (42 billion active), supports text, image, speech, and video input, and offers a one-million-token context window. Xiaomi trained the models using scaled reinforcement learning, live-streaming the production run and releasing weights, technical reports, and training code. The series also includes MiMo-V2.6-Flash and a faster UltraSpeed variant. API pricing remains unchanged from the previous generation.

• Xiaomi released MiMo-V2.6-Pro, the top open-weight AI model with 46 points on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.
• The model has 1.02 trillion parameters (42 billion active), a 1 million token context window, and multimodal input.
• Xiaomi trained the models using reinforcement learning over 750,000 trajectories in under six days.

Xiaomi MiMo-V2.6-Pro tops open weights, trained for $3M

Xiaomi released MiMo-V2.6-Pro, a natively omnimodal open-weights model with 1.02T total / 42B active parameters, trained for $3M (about 130 hours and 75B tokens). It debuts as the top open-weights model on Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index (46) with cost efficiency at $0.435/M input and $0.87/M output tokens, under an MIT license. Xiaomi also open-sourced the RL training environment code and recipes, but not the full 7k+ task datasets, signaling an emphasis on transparency in RL training.

• Xiaomi released MiMo-V2.6-Pro and MiMo-V2.6-Flash, natively omnimodal open-weights models.
• MiMo-V2.6-Pro has 1.02T total / 42B active parameters and tops the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 46.
• RL training run cost $2.6M, used 75B tokens over 130 hours.