Huawei in 2025: 25 Wacky Facts About Their Defiant Comeback
You probably don't need telling that Huawei, even in 2025, is a bit of a wacky company. After years of intense global pressure, they’re not just surviving; they're staging one of the most defiant comebacks in tech history. From alternating 3 CEOs, to 12 TOWN campus that needs a TRAIN to go around, Huawei has truly made a name for itself in 2025.
So, welcome to my top 25 things you might not know about them—from their unbelievable campus to the secret tech that's powering their resurgence.
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The Fairytale Campus: Huawei has a massive R&D campus in China (the Ox Horn Campus) so large it's divided into 12 separate "towns." Each one is modeled on a famous European city, like Paris, Granada, and Verona.
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It Has Its Own Train: The campus is so sprawling that it takes a full 22 minutes to do one lap on the tram. Because yes, the campus has its own train service to shuttle employees between "Europe."
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The Secret Castle: Within this area is a massive, opulent castle. This isn't just for show; it's rumored to house some of the company's most secretive and high-level research units.
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The "Rotating" Leader: Huawei doesn't have one CEO. It uses a rotating chairman system. Three top executives take turns as the company's highest-ranking leader for six months at a time. (In 2024, the founder's daughter, Meng Wanzhou, famously took her turn). It’s done so different leaders can bring expertise from various parts of the company.
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The "Honor" Breakup: You might remember Huawei had two brands: Huawei for executives and Honor for "digital natives." This is no longer true. In 2020, to save it from US sanctions, Huawei sold Honor. Honor is now a completely separate, independent company (and a fierce competitor).
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The iPhone-Praising Founder: The founder, Ren Zhengfei, is one of the richest people in China despite owning less than 2% of the company. He's also famously pragmatic, having publicly praised iPhones and even admitted he buys them for his family. His words were, "One can't narrowly think love for Huawei should mean loving Huawei phones."
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The Military Past: A big source of US controversy stems from the founder himself. Ren Zhengfei served as an engineer for China's military (the People's Liberation Army), leading to deep-seated concerns in the West about his ties to the Chinese government.
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A National Symbol: Huawei is incredibly important to China. It’s not just about money; their recent comeback is a source of immense national pride. Their success in building their own chips (see below) is seen as proof of China's technological independence.
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The 6-Month Prototypes: Huawei operates far in advance. A former executive once mentioned seeing the P30 Pro's (a 2019 phone) final prototype a full six months before the firm actually announced it. This long-term pipeline is how they survived the sanctions.
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The Smart Glasses Are Real: They make advanced smart glasses with built-in speakers for music and dual microphones for calls. What started as a weird experiment is now an evolving product line, showing their continued investment in next-gen personal audio.
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The Ghost in America: Even in 2025, almost nobody in the US has a Huawei phone. US carriers (like Verizon) still don't offer them due to government pressure. This means that while they're #1 in China, they have less than 1% market share in the United States.
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The "Moon Mode" Controversy: Huawei has a trust problem, and sometimes they don't help themselves. They faced a massive controversy over "Moon Mode," a feature that let you take shockingly clear 50x zoom photos of the moon. A photographer concluded they were faking it—using AI to detect the moon and "fill in" details that weren't really there. Huawei denies this, but the scandal stuck.
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The "Tweeted from an iPhone" Curse: It's not just the founder who used Apple. Huawei has been famously embarrassed multiple times by its own social media team and celebrity endorsers tweeting about how great Huawei phones are... from an iPhone.
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Banned from 5G... A huge part of the US-led sanctions involved banning countries from using Huawei's 5G infrastructure equipment. The US and Australia straight-up stopped Huawei from being any part of their 5G rollout.
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...So They Invented 5.5G: This is the 2025 twist. While the West was banning them from 5G, Huawei was busy investing in the next thing. They are now a world leader in "5.5G" (or 5G-Advanced), a new standard with 10x speed improvements, which they are already rolling out.
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The "Solution": Build Everything. Faced with potential bans from everything, Huawei's solution was to build its own version of... well, everything. Their own OS, their own chips, their own app store. It was seen as impossible.
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Meet HarmonyOS NEXT: They did it. In 2024, Huawei launched HarmonyOS NEXT. This isn't just a skin on Android; it's a completely "pure" operating system from the ground up. It contains no Android code and runs its own native "Hap" apps, effectively divorcing itself from Google entirely.
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The Chip That Shocked the World: In late 2023, they quietly launched the Mate 60 Pro. Tech experts tore it down and found the Kirin 9000S, an advanced 7nm chip. The world was stunned. Nobody thought Huawei could produce a chip this advanced on its own, proving their "impossible" domestic supply chain was real. In 2025, their new Pura and Mate series phones run on even newer Kirin 9020 chips.
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The R&D Army: How did they do this? By having one of the biggest R&D budgets on Earth. Forget 30,000 or 40,000 R&D employees. As of 2024, Huawei had over 114,000 employees in R&D alone—that's 55% of their entire company.
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The King of China: Their "impossible" comeback is complete. In 2024, HarmonyOS officially overtook Apple's iOS in market share in China. After being left for dead, Huawei is once again the #1 smartphone seller in their home country.
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They're a Car Company Now: Huawei's "wacky" products now include full-blown cars. They don't build them all themselves but provide the "brains." Their AITO brand (in partnership with Seres) is a massive hit, and they provide the HarmonyOS-powered smart cockpits and autonomous driving for multiple Chinese auto brands.
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What's in a Name? The word "Huawei" itself literally translates to "Chinese achievement" or "China's promise." Given their story of the last five years, it's hard to find a more fitting name.
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Their Own University: To fuel their R&D army, Huawei has its own university. It's a massive campus complete with student housing. The idea is simple: you qualify, you get trained, and you can have a direct job at Huawei with the exact skills they need.
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The $25 Billion Bet: The founder, Ren Zhengfei, said in a 2025 interview that of their massive $180 billion yuan R&D budget, a full 60 billion yuan ($25B USD) is allocated just for "theoretical research"—the kind of deep science that leads to breakthroughs, not just products.
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The $5,000 Start: It's kind of amazing then that this entire $100+ billion-per-year global giant, this symbol of national pride and controversy, was started just 30-odd years ago with less than $5,000 worth of capital.