Ren Zhengfei doesn’t fear reinvention. The former military engineer, who grew up hungry as one of seven children in a dirt-poor family living in China’s impoverished central province of Guizhou, founded Huawei in 1987 as a humble reseller of Hong Kong-made telephone switches. Before long, the firm moved into developing its own telecom equipment, cell phones, and laptops—and later cloud computing and even EVs.
Today, Ren leads one of the most consequential AI powerhouses on the planet. Huawei’s new Ascend 910C AI chip now reportedly achieves up to 60% of performance in inference tasks when compared to Nvidia’s latest H100 AI-powered chips, recasting the firm as central to China’s attempts to challenge U.S. tech dominance. Huawei also boasts the CloudMatrix 384, a China-based AI system built using domestic chipsets, and its own Harmony operating system. Despite being subject to strict U.S. sanctions, Huawei reported revenue of more than $118 billion in 2024, a 22.4% year-on-year rise.