Huaxintong Semiconductor has been formed with the aim of developing server chips that are more focused on addressing the needs of the Chinese market and cloud computing servers providing internet infrastructure.

Huaxintong's CEO Kai Wang said that licensing ARM chips will see the company “play an important role in the Chinese chip market”.

The target is the 2.5 million servers run by telcos and others in Guizhou. At the moment they are running Intel's Xeon CPUs. If Huaxintong manages to replace Intel in just a third of the servers in the region it will have done some serious damage to the chip giant.

Intel’s defence is that Xeon-D cleans ARM’s clock in terms of running costs and beat it handily on performance while offering a familiar architecture. Even with Qualcomm’s assistance, the ARM CPU is appreciably inferior to a Xeon.

But China might go for the cunning plan because the best Xeons are not available to the Chinese. There is a small chance that things will get more restricted in the Middle Kingdom under the reign Donald “Prince of Orange” Trump.

No doubt there will be inducements for the Chinese to move to their locally grown chips as the government will be rather keen not to kowtow to the land of the free.