The plot thickens in the great AI chip race. Tingbo He, president of Huawei ’s chip-design subsidiary HiSilicon, says her company’s engineers have developed a novel way to optimize semiconductors—and she believes it will close the performance gap between Chinese and Western chips over the next few years. Huawei’s method, in short, focuses on speeding up computations across chips, circuits, and entire computing systems, rather than squeezing ever-more components onto a single piece of silicon. “We found a new path,” He said at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems in Shanghai last weekend. He, who is known in China as Huawei’s “chip queen,” promised that the company would prove the viability of the new approach, presumably with a new chip, in the coming months. “Before winter 2026, we will bring the surprise,” He said.…