Huawei is pushing harder into AI and OS independence. At its annual developer event, it rolled out HarmonyOS 6 beta, a new framework for building AI agents, and serious cloud infrastructure muscle. Developers now get early access to the OS, while Huawei positions itself as an AI-first alternative to Apple and Google.
Inside Huawei’s Latest Announcements
Huawei has officially opened HarmonyOS 6 to developers, offering early access to its next-gen mobile operating system. Though there’s no set launch date for the public, the beta release brings with it a major emphasis on artificial intelligence.
Richard Yu, head of Huawei’s consumer group, showcased a key upgrade: the HarmonyOS Agent Framework. This toolkit allows developers to build AI agents—automated task-performing programs—without training their own foundation models.
Huawei says more than 50 AI agents will be available at launch, including integrations from major Chinese platforms like Weibo and Ximalaya.
The event also spotlighted Huawei’s Pangu 5.5 model family, featuring a massive 718 billion-parameter NLP model and a 15 billion-parameter vision model. These are aimed at industry use cases, spanning healthcare, finance, governance, manufacturing, and automotive.
Meanwhile, Huawei’s custom-built AI cloud server has migrated to the new CloudMatrix 384 Supernode architecture. It combines 384 Ascend AI chips and 192 Kunpeng CPUs, setting the stage for intense AI training and inference tasks.
Why This Matters for the AI Race
Huawei is clearly taking the long view: building a self-reliant OS ecosystem, industrial-grade AI tools, and now its own rack-scale cloud servers to rival Nvidia. While HarmonyOS still lags iOS and Android globally, its domestic presence is expanding fast. Nearly half of all HarmonyOS devices shipped in 2024 alone.
For developers and enterprise users in China, the AI Agent Framework could drastically lower the barrier to entry for building AI-driven features. And CloudMatrix 384 may help Huawei break reliance on U.S. GPU tech.
Expert Insight
“But the top 5,000 apps accounted for 99.9 per cent of consumer time spent” on Huawei devices, noted Richard Yu during the event—a subtle pushback against concerns about HarmonyOS’s limited app ecosystem.
GazeOn’s Take: Huawei’s Stealth Strategy
This update isn’t just about phones. It’s about building a parallel stack that can rival Big Tech across devices, software, and cloud. The HarmonyOS 6 beta and CloudMatrix 384 rollout show that Huawei isn’t just surviving post-sanctions—it’s drawing a roadmap to lead the next industrial AI wave.
Reader Prompt
Can Huawei’s AI-first ecosystem really rival Apple, Google, or Nvidia? Or is it a walled garden only for China?
About Author:
Eli Grid is a technology journalist covering the intersection of artificial intelligence, policy, and innovation. With a background in computational linguistics and over a decade of experience reporting on AI research and global tech strategy, Eli is known for his investigative features and clear, data-informed analysis. His reporting bridges the gap between technical breakthroughs and their real-world implications bringing readers timely, insightful stories from the front lines of the AI revolution. Eli’s work has been featured in leading tech outlets and cited by academic and policy institutions worldwide.
