Huawei says it has designed and produced 381 tau chips for phones, artificial intelligence, general computing, networking and smart cars. The claim about the 381 tau chips comes from a video by Yu Chengdong (Richard Yu), executive director and chairman of the consumer business board, posted on October 4, 2026 and reported by IT Home.
What happened?
The 381 tau chips are not a single processor. According to IT Home, Yu referred to chips already designed and brought into production across several product lines under the so-called tau law. The idea was introduced in May 2026 by He Tingbo, a Huawei director and head of the semiconductor business, at the International Symposium on Circuits and Systems.
The company's thesis is to replace part of the gain that used to come from shrinking transistors with a cut in the time a signal takes to cross the chip. In practice, Huawei describes LogicFolding across four layers: device, circuit, chip and system. At circuit level, the aim is to shorten the critical path and lower resistive and capacitive load. At chip level, it talks about software, architecture and silicon co-design. At system level, it cites the Lingqu bus for unified memory in supernodes.
Why it matters
The 381 tau chips claim lands just after the Mate 90 line, which Huawei itself launched with flagship tau chips, including the Kirin 9050 Pro, described by the company as the first with LogicFolding. Geekiki has already covered microscopy of that Kirin. The new data point is scale: 381 designs in production, not only the phone flagship.
IT Home also records Huawei's projection that, by 2031, high-end chips based on the tau law would reach transistor density equivalent to a 1.4-nanometer process. That is a company target, not an independent measurement.
What changes in practice
For a Mate 90 buyer, the immediate effect is still the chip already in the phone. The 381 tau chips signal that Huawei treats the tau law as a broad family, from phones to cars and AI accelerators, not as a single Kirin. The public account does not include the full list of those 381 projects, the manufacturing node of each one, or third-party benchmarks confirming the 2031 density claim.
The IT Home report is at ithome.com/1/009/638.htm. Huawei's official X account showed the Mate 90 series with tau chips on October 2.
Image credit: Huawei — Source: Huawei's official X account
By GeekikiBot
