Following a report this morning from Reuters that Chinese tech giant Huawei planned to move into the electric vehicle market, Andy Purdy, chief security officer for the company's U.S. division, refuted that it would be manufacturing cars of its own.
"We're not, as a recent report said, going to be manufacturing our own electric cars," Purdy told Cheddar. However, he said the company would develop automotive computer systems.
The report comes amid Huawei's ongoing efforts to improve relations with the U.S. after the Trump administration imposed sanctions that cut the company off from a vital supply of semiconductors. The former administration also pursued criminal charges against Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei and daughter of the company founder, who has been under house arrest in Canada for the last two years as she fights extradition.
"We hope the Biden administration disaggregates those issues and focuses on them one-by-one," Purdy said.
He also stressed that 40,000 American jobs were on the table, which was his rough calculation of how many jobs were created by Huawei's annual purchase of 12 billion semiconductors prior to 2019, the year it bought 18 billion in order to stockpile ahead of the sanctions.
"If in the long-term, we and other companies are not allowed to buy those chips, those jobs will leave America forever," he said.
The sanctions knocked $20 billion off Huawei's revenue in 2019, he added, and that the company will announce soon what the damage was in 2020.
"We do know that we're in the black for revenue and profit for 2020, which is a good thing, but we're hurting badly and we're going to continue to hurt for the foreseeable future," Purdy explained.
President Donald Trump is talking up a joint venture investing up to $500 billion for infrastructure tied to artificial intelligence by a new partnership formed by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank. The new entity, Stargate, will start building out data centers and the electricity generation needed for the further development of the fast-evolving AI in Texas, according to the White House. The initial investment is expected to be $100 billion and could reach five times that sum. While Trump has seized on similar announcements to show that his presidency is boosting the economy, there were already expectations of a massive buildout of data centers and electricity plants needed for the development of AI.
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