Books: Huawei's origin story probed, but no smoking gun

Earlier this month, reports emerged that the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei Technologies had bought 2 million semiconductors from Taiwan's Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. through shell companies, circumventing U.S. restrictions aimed at blocking Chinese access to advanced chips.

That Huawei needs to jump through hoops to buy its chips speaks as much to the globally interconnected nature of telecoms equipment manufacturing as to the fact that it is struggling after nearly a decade-long technology cold war, in which the U.S. sees Huawei as its primary adversary. In many ways, though, it does not seem that the company, or China's technology markets, are struggling at all: Huawei shocked the world recently with the release of the Ascend 910C, an advanced AI accelerator chip that the company plans to mass-produce this year.