Huawei, which gets the bulk of its revenue from the sale of telecommunications equipment and smartphones, is seeking growth avenues in cloud computing and enterprise services. The US has moved to protect its interests by leaning on its allies to snub Huawei and arranging the detention of its executives.

Subsidiary HiSilicon designed the Kunpeng 920 chipset.

“It is part of our system solution and cloud servicing for clients ... We will never make our chipset business a standalone business”, said Ai Wei, who is in charge of strategic planning for Huawei’s chipsets and hardware technology.

The Shenzhen-based company already makes the Kirin series of smartphone chips used in its high end phones and the Ascend series of chipsets for artificial intelligence computing launched in October.

It said its latest 7 nanometres, 64-core central processing unit (CPU) would provide much higher computing performance for data centers and slash power consumption. It is based on the architecture of British chip design firm ARM which is seeking to challenge the dominance in server CPUs of US maker Intel Corp (INTC.O).

Huawei aims to “drive the development of the ARM ecosystem”, said Chief Marketing Officer William Xu. He said the chip has “unique advantages in performance and power consumption”.

Xu also said Huawei would continue its “long-term strategic partnership” with Intel.

Huawei’s new ARM-based CPU is not a competitor to the US company’s x86 CPUs and servers, but complementary, Xu added.

Redfox Qiu, president of the intelligent computing business department at Huawei, said the company shipped 900,000 units of servers in 2018, versus 77,000 in 2012 when it started.

Huawei was seeing “good momentum for the server business in Europe and the Asia Pacific” and expects the contribution from its international business to continue to rise, Qiu added.

Huawei also released its TaiShan series of servers powered by the new chipset, built for big data, distributed storage, and ARM native applications.