Huawei has been having a rough week, starting with when the Chinese firm was added to the U.S. Department of Commerce"s "Entity List". After that, the dominos started to fall. First, Google suspended the company"s Google Play license, effectively stopping the company from making Android phones, at least with Google services. Later, it was reported that Intel, Qualcomm, and Broadcom all ceased operations with Huawei.
But even though Huawei doesn"t use Qualcomm chipsets in its handsets, it turns out that there"s another major blow. ARM has told its employees to cease "all active contracts, support entitlements, and any pending engagements", according to a memo obtained by BBC News. Even though Arm Holdings is a UK-based company, it says that its designs have a lot of "US origin technology".
This is a major blow for Huawei. Even without Google, the Chinese company still has the option of making handsets using the Android Open Source Project; however, they won"t be able to make their own chipsets anymore without a license from ARM, and they can"t buy them from Qualcomm. It seems like the only option left is to buy chipsets from MediaTek, a Taiwanese firm.
Huawei is the second largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, behind only Samsung. The company surely isn"t going to just give up, but it"s certainly running out of options.