Founder & CEO, Huawei
Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei speaks at Davos
The CEO of Huawei Ren Zhengfei is speaking at the World Economic Forum. He talks at averting tech war. Watch the video for more information:
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About Ren Zhengfei
Ren Zhengfei, founder and CEO of Huawei, appeared in a livestream on May 25, 2026, to present the company's Tau (τ) Scaling Law, a new principle for semiconductor development. During the event, he stated that Huawei had shifted from geometric scaling to "time scaling" as a guiding principle for electronic system evolution. He said the company had spent six years preparing tools and methodologies, including EDA tools and design approaches, and that a "surprise" for the industry would be delivered in winter 2026, describing it as "a big leap ahead." Zhengfei discussed the introduction of "logical folding," a design methodology for digital circuits that he said optimizes power, performance, density, and cost. He claimed that in 2026, logical folding achieved 238 million transistors per square millimeter in a single step, with a 41% improvement in power efficiency and a nearly 13% increase in maximum clock frequency. He also announced a new bus protocol called UB, which he said unifies interconnect across computer systems. He projected that by 2031, Huawei's high-end chips based on the Tau law would have transistor density equivalent to 14 Å (1.4 nm) processes, with CPU core frequencies exceeding 5 GHz.
Transcript (8 segments)
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Host0:00
And going back across the divorce where the founder and CEO of Huawei is addressing the World Economic Forum. We get to that address in just a few minutes from now. The stage is set for the founder and chief executive officer of Huawei, Ren Zhengfei, to speak on averting a tech war as a part of the 50th World Economic Forum in Davos.
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Ren Zhengfei0:33
Had concerns, however, with the development of industrial society, those fears disappeared over time. As society continues to evolve, it came to what we are today: the information society. What does it mean? It's where electronics technologies are so advanced. The most law will still be there as the constraint of a kinetic electronics industry, but once we come to three or two nanometer of a chipset process technology, this is something we know for sure. And with the explosive development of information power, information technology is pervasive, is everywhere. The breakthroughs of biotech and other emerging technologies, and the breakthroughs across different disciplines, across different domains, are obscuring, helping accumulate capacity, ultimately leading to technology explosion. Technology explosion that causes a fear among people whether that's good or bad. To me, I think it's pretty good. I believe in the face of new technologies, humanity will be able to use new technologies to benefit society instead of destroy society, because the majority of people in society aspire for a good life instead of a miserable life.
When I was born, that was the time when the atom bomb was exploded in Japan. When I was six or seven, the biggest fear people had was around atom bombs. That was a global fear. But if we look at life or history from a distance, we see enormous benefit from atomic energy and radiation application in medicine and others that brought about enormous benefits to humanity. Today we are seeing fears about artificial intelligence, but we should not over-exaggerate. The explosion of atom bombs would hurt people, but people can manage that. And AI is not as damaging as atom bombs, right? And far away, our research is the so-called weak AI. There are boundaries, there are constraints, there are enabling datasets to enable that. And using things like autonomous driving, mining, biomedicine, and other domains, there are clear boundaries in terms of where AI can be applied. With more advancement of AI, it can enormously create total wealth. And people are saying many people would lose their jobs as total wealth is being created, and that is a societal issue that needs to be addressed. But you better have more total wealth than less. Today in society we live in, no matter if it's poor people or rich people, the absolute amount of total wealth is much more than what we had decades ago. And of course, the rich-poor divide is bigger. That does not mean you still have many people below the absolute poverty line. To address the widening income gap, that's a social issue, not a technical issue.
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Host4:10
A huge number of really interesting issues, and I want to focus on two of them and ask Professor Harari to respond. One is the comparison with the atom bomb and atomic energy broadly. Is that an appropriate analogy? Because I think that's a very interesting analogy in the context of this discussion about a tech arms race. And secondly, I'm sure everybody in this room, Mr. Ren, would agree that there are huge benefits to be had from technology. I'm sure Professor Harari would agree of that too. But do you think that there is something, and I'm asking you again, Professor, fundamentally different about the nature of AI and biotech, which means that it is significantly more dangerous than previous technological breakthroughs?
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Yuval Noah Harari4:59
Yeah, I mean, the comparison with the atom bomb is important. It teaches us that when humanity recognizes a common threat, then it can unite even in the midst of a Cold War to lay down rules and prevent the worst, which is what happened in the Cold War. The problem with AI compared with atomic weapons is that the danger is not so obvious, and at least for some actors, they see an enormous benefit from using it. With the atom bomb, the great thing was that everybody knows when you use it, it's the end of the world. You can't win a nuclear war, an all-out nuclear war. But many people think, and I think with some good reason, that you can win an AI arms race. And that's very dangerous because then the temptation to win the race and dominate the world is much bigger.
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Host5:58
So that's, I'm going to really put you on the spot there. Do you think that is a mindset more in Washington or in Beijing?
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Yuval Noah Harari6:04
I would say Beijing and San Francisco. I think in Washington they don't fully understand the implications of what is happening. I think at present the race is really between Beijing and San Francisco, but San Francisco is getting closer to Washington because they need the backing of the government on this. So it's not completely separate.
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Host6:29
So the first was the one question. Just the second question was about AI that you've also deported. I actually want to go back to Mr. Ren to respond to that, because you are clearly the target of much American concern.