Huawei's server product line will be sold to the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Suzhou, Yicai.com reported Friday.
The report said Huawei's x86 servers could not continue to be produced due to problems with the supply of chips from Intel. However, Huawei will retain the server business with its own chip Kunpeng, according to the report.
Huawei did not respond to this, according to the report. However, Huawei internal sources close to the server business said the company will not give up the server business, but the business is affected by production disruptions.
Huawei has gradually gained a firm foothold in the server market over the past decade with the help of Intel's chips. Finance had been a core market for Huawei's servers, with customers including the Russian central bank, the Italian central bank, and Spain's Banco Santander.
Huawei ranked fifth in the global server market with a 4.9 percent share in the third quarter of 2020, but was replaced by IBM in the first quarter of this year, according to research firm IDC.
In September last year, Intel said it had permission from the US government to continue supplying specific products to Huawei, but did not specify which ones.
At the end of May this year, there was news that Intel's chip supply to Huawei was again in trouble. Intel's cooperation with Huawei has never fully resumed, Yicai said, citing several analysts who track the server industry.
This comes after Huawei's rotating chairman, Xu Zhijun, said that once Kunpeng grows, there will be other companies designing CPUs. While there are strong and weak players, this gives China another option, Xu said.
Xu said at the time that 12 partners had already launched the Kunpeng line of servers and PC products. In 2020, partner server shipments reached more than 50 percent of Kunpeng's server shipments, and this year they are expected to reach more than 80 percent.
(Photo source: Huawei website)
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