Huawei Unveils Qingyun HM650, China’s First 100% Homegrown Desktop PC
Huawei has launched the first desktop computer it claims is made entirely with Chinese parts. The Qingyun HM650, unveiled in Wuhan on 5 November 2026, runs on Huawei’s own Kirin X90 processor and its own HarmonyOS operating system. There is no Intel chip inside, no Qualcomm chip, and no Windows.
For Huawei, the machine is the latest step in a seven-year effort to build a computer that does not depend on American technology. For the rest of the world, it is a test of how far China has come in making its own chips, software and hardware — and how far it still has to go.
What Huawei launched in Wuhan
Huawei used its HarmonyOS Office Industry Summit in Wuhan on 5 November 2026 to launch the Qingyun HM650 series. The range covers three models: the HM650, the HM650g and a high-performance HM650g. The HM650 is aimed at companies, while the HM650g is aimed at government departments. All three are sold through commercial channels, not in shops.
The machines are built for office work, programming and engineering design. Huawei pitches them at government agencies, state-owned companies and large businesses in China, with central controls that let IT departments manage devices and apps across a whole organisation.
Huawei first showed the HM650 at its Huawei Connect event in Shanghai on 17 September 2026, 49 days before the Wuhan launch. The company has not announced a price or a sale date itself. Reports from China give conflicting dates, with 1 December the most specific, based on listings seen on the shopping site JD.com. Reports also put the starting price at 6,899 yuan for an 8-core HM650g with 16GB of memory, though Huawei has not confirmed this.
Inside the machine: Kirin X90 and HarmonyOS
The heart of the HM650 is the Kirin X90, a processor designed by HiSilicon, Huawei’s chip-design arm. It is a 10-core, 20-thread chip rated at 40 watts, well below the 65 to 125 watts typical of desktop processors. It is paired with Huawei’s Maleoon 910 graphics chip, and the desktop uses a two-layer cooling system designed to hold its speed through long workloads.
The Kirin X90 first appeared in Huawei’s laptops and tablets in 2025. The HM650 is the first desktop to use it.
The software is HarmonyOS V1.0, an enterprise edition of the operating system Huawei already runs on its laptops and tablets. Huawei says the PC version of HarmonyOS draws on more than 2,700 core patents and five years of research. Engineers rebuilt it from the kernel, the lowest layer of software that talks to the hardware.
Huawei says more than 21,000 applications now work on HarmonyOS PCs, covering office suites and professional design tools. That number matters, because the first test for any desktop that leaves Windows behind is whether it can open the files a ministry or a company receives every day. Apps rewritten for HarmonyOS carry that load, and the 21,000 figure is how Huawei measures the rewrite so far.
Both the Kirin X90 and HarmonyOS V1.0 hold China’s Level II security and reliability certification, a rating government buyers in China weigh when choosing office PCs. That gives Huawei a route into government offices that rivals using foreign chips find harder to match.
What “100% domestic” really means
The headline claim is that every component in the HM650 is made in China. Huawei describes the machine as the first desktop in China to receive a 100 per cent domestic certification, covering parts from the processor to the memory modules. The certification was carried out by Zhejiang Kezheng Electronic Information Product Inspection, according to reports.
But the claim needs careful reading. The certifying body’s test criteria have not been published, and the South China Morning Post, which first reported the launch, noted that the exact scope of the certification is unclear. The certification covers where the components were made. It does not prove that every underlying technology, patent or piece of know-how used in the machine was developed in China.
That distinction matters. Designing a chip and manufacturing it are separate jobs. HiSilicon designs Kirin processors, but SMIC, China’s largest contract chipmaker, has produced recent Kirin chips, and its factories include older machines imported before export controls tightened. A desktop can carry only Chinese-made parts and still depend on foreign tools at the factory stage.
Zhu Dongdong, president of Huawei’s tablet and PC product line, told the Wuhan audience that Huawei reached the 100 per cent figure through three routes: developing core technologies in-house, working with partners on key components, and buying general-purpose hardware from Chinese factories at scale.
Why Huawei stopped using Intel and Qualcomm chips
The HM650 exists because of a chain of events that began in 2019. Before Washington tightened its rules, most Huawei laptops ran on Intel Core processors and some used Qualcomm Snapdragon chips.
In May 2019, the United States added Huawei to its Entity List, which meant American companies needed a licence to sell it anything. Intel held one such licence for laptop processors from 2020, and Qualcomm held one for older 4G phone chips. Both licences kept Huawei’s laptop range running on American silicon until 2024.
In April 2024, Huawei launched the MateBook X Pro with an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor, its first laptop sold on AI features. US lawmakers objected, and on 7 May 2024 the Commerce Department revoked the licences. Intel disclosed in a filing that it had lost the right to sell consumer products to a customer in China. Qualcomm said it had expected its Huawei chip revenue to end with calendar 2024, and the revocation pulled that date forward.
Huawei’s licence to install Microsoft Windows on its PCs expired in March 2025. That left the company needing a new processor and a new operating system in the same year, and its first HarmonyOS laptops went on sale two months later, in May 2025.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| May 2019 | US adds Huawei to its Entity List, restricting American technology sales. |
| August 2019 | Huawei launches HarmonyOS. |
| 7 May 2024 | US revokes licences that allowed Intel and Qualcomm to sell chips to Huawei for laptops and phones. |
| March 2025 | Huawei’s licence to install Windows on its PCs expires. |
| May 2025 | First HarmonyOS laptops go on sale in China. |
| 2025 | Kirin X90 earns China’s Level II security and reliability certification. |
| 17 September 2026 | Huawei showcases the HM650 desktop at Huawei Connect in Shanghai. |
| 5 November 2026 | Huawei launches the Qingyun HM650 series in Wuhan. |
How HarmonyOS grew from phones to PCs
Huawei launched HarmonyOS in August 2019, three months after the Entity List ruling cut it off from Google’s Android services. Phones and tablets carried the system first. Research firm Canalys counted about 103 million HarmonyOS phones and 21 million HarmonyOS tablets shipped by the end of 2024.
In 2024, Huawei also released HarmonyOS Next. That version stopped running Android apps, so developers now write software for Huawei’s platform itself. Each of those rewrites widens the pool of apps that the HM650 inherits.
Laptops followed in May 2025 and desktops in November 2026, each step moving the same software onto a bigger screen. Developers who write a HarmonyOS app for a phone can reach a tablet, a laptop and now an office desktop from the same code base. That reach is the pitch Huawei makes to software companies in China.
Zhu told the Wuhan audience that Huawei had sold more than 1 million HarmonyOS PCs by October 2026 and expects to reach 1.2 million by the end of the year. Research firm Omdia counted 141,000 HarmonyOS PCs shipped in 2025, the first year on sale. If both counts measure the same thing, Huawei’s year-end target implies about 1.06 million HarmonyOS PCs sold in 2026. That would fall short of Omdia’s March forecast of 1.4 million for the year.
Against the wider market, HarmonyOS is still a small player. Research firm IDC counted 62.7 million PCs shipped worldwide in the third quarter of 2026 alone, a fall of 20.1 per cent. Huawei shipped about 4.2 million PCs in China in 2024, including 3.8 million laptops, according to Canalys. One million HarmonyOS machines across two years marks a start in China’s PC market, not a takeover.
What the HM650 means for Intel in China
The HM650 goes after the next layer of Intel’s business in China. Twenty-four per cent of Intel’s $52.85 billion revenue in 2025 came from billings to China, according to the company’s annual report. That works out to about $12.7 billion.
Huawei’s lost laptop orders already sit outside that figure, since the licences ended in May 2024. The HM650 targets government and state-owned offices that bought Intel-based desktops from Chinese brands such as Lenovo. If those buyers switch to a fully Chinese machine, Intel loses another slice of its biggest market.
The pressure runs the other way too. China is also the centre of the global fight over advanced AI chips. Around 600,000 Nvidia H200 AI chips are reported to be stuck in Hong Kong warehouses because Beijing has withheld approval for bulk imports, and US export controls are meant to stop advanced chips reaching Chinese firms. The HM650 shows the same contest playing out in ordinary office computers, not just in AI data centres.
When the Huawei Qingyun HM650 goes on sale
Huawei’s announcement leaves the sale date and the price blank. Because the HM650 sells through government and enterprise channels, buyers will see contract prices instead of a shop listing in China.
Huawei’s next test lies in its own forecast: the 1.2 million HarmonyOS PCs Zhu expects by 31 December 2026. Government orders for the HM650 will show whether the 100 per cent domestic label converts into volume. Huawei’s tablet business offers a warning, with Omdia counting a 43 per cent fall in Huawei tablet shipments in the third quarter of 2026. Both numbers will be on the table when Huawei reports full-year results in early 2027.
For now, the HM650 is a statement as much as a product. Seven years after the US cut Huawei off from American technology, the company can put a desktop on a government desk with its own chip, its own operating system and, by its own certification, not a single foreign-made part. Whether buyers outside China’s government offices ever see one is a different question — Huawei has announced no international availability — but inside China, the age of the fully homegrown PC has begun.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Huawei Qingyun HM650?
The Qingyun HM650 is Huawei’s first desktop computer running its own HarmonyOS operating system. It uses Huawei’s Kirin X90 processor and is aimed at government departments and companies in China.
Is the HM650 really 100% made in China?
Huawei says the HM650 has received certification for a 100 per cent domestic component rate, verified by Zhejiang Kezheng Electronic Information Product Inspection. The certification covers where the hardware components were made. Its exact test criteria have not been published, and it does not prove that every underlying technology was developed in China.
When will the HM650 be available?
Huawei has not announced a sale date or a price. Reports from China point to 1 December 2026 as the most likely start of sales, with a reported starting price of 6,899 yuan. The machines are sold through government and enterprise channels, not in shops.
Can I buy the HM650 outside China?
Huawei has not announced international availability for the Qingyun HM650. It is aimed at Chinese public-sector and enterprise buyers.
What is HarmonyOS?
HarmonyOS is Huawei’s own operating system, launched in August 2019 after the US cut the company off from Google’s Android services. It now runs on phones, tablets, laptops and, with the HM650, desktop computers.
Sources
- South China Morning Post (via AI Weekly): https://aiweekly.co/alerts/huawei-debuts-qingyun-hm650-as-first-100-domestic-pc
- Gadgets Now (Times of India): https://gadgetsnow.indiatimes.com/tech-news/huawei-launches-its-first-harmonyos-desktop-with-a-kirin-x90-and-all-chinese-parts/articleshow/135632303.cms
- GSMDome: https://www.gsmdome.com/huawei-says-qingyun-hm650-desktop-has-100-locally-sourced-components
- Crypto Briefing: https://cryptobriefing.com/huawei-qingyun-hm650-harmonyos-desktop/
This article is for general information and education only. It is not legal or financial advice.
