Huawei has arranged a 15 billion yuan facility, denominated in offshore yuan with a seven-year tenor, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. Six Chinese lenders participated, including Bank of China Ltd., China Construction Bank Corp. and Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd.
The person said the borrowing will go toward broad corporate uses and requested anonymity because the information is private. Huawei and the three named banks did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
With US curbs in place since 2019, mainland lenders have become central to Huawei's offshore financing. Bloomberg data show this marks Huawei's first syndicated borrowing offshore since 2020, when it lined up an HK$11.8 billion loan worth about $1.5 billion. Before the 2019 restrictions, Huawei tapped international syndicates across Europe, the US and Asia for billions in overseas loans.
Before settling on the new facility, Huawei also explored options with international banks, people familiar said.
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The funding appetite ties back to heavier AI investment. During the first half of this year, Huawei's research spending reached 121 billion yuan. At the same time, memory prices jumped, pushing the company to build inventory, that led to cash outflows totaling 39.9 billion yuan and pressured profitability over the period.
Huawei has become China's go-to champion in chipmaking, part of a small circle at the center of Beijing's push to lead in AI and swap out US software and hardware with local options. The ties run deep: last month, AI startup DeepSeek publicly released software it co-developed with Huawei to program AI chips. DeepSeek intends to deploy a minimum of 160,000 of Huawei's flagship accelerators at a new Inner Mongolia data center, potentially making it one of the biggest known Huawei AI chip clusters. DeepSeek aims to buy even more of Huawei's best chips, but Huawei does not currently have the production capacity to supply them.
The bottom line: Huawei is leaning on domestic lenders to fund an AI buildout that is raising R&D, pulling forward component purchases and swinging cash flow. That mix matters for suppliers tied to Huawei's chip and memory spend, Chinese bank fee pools from syndicated loans, and any global peers exposed to the same chip supply bottlenecks.
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