Huawei’s Pura X, a foldable smartphone launched Thursday, is the first to run the tech giant’s own operating system as it looks to create a viable alternative to Google’s Android and Apple‘s iOS.

When unfolded, the Pura X has a 6.3-inch display, but its 16:10 aspect ratio gives it a wider screen area than most other smartphones on the market. The device folds in half into a compact square and has a 3.5-inch display with a camera at the front.

The Pura X starts at 7,499 Chinese yuan ($1,037).

The device is important for Huawei for two reasons.

Firstly, since the end of 2023, Huawei has seen a revival in its smartphone business in China following U.S. sanctions which had crippled its sales.

Huawei has aggressively launched more unusual devices in an effort to differentiate itself from rivals, including a trifold smartphone.

The Shenzhen-headquartered company also poses a challenge to Apple in China.

Huawei’s market share in the fourth quarter of 2024 rose to 16.2% in China versus 13.7% a year before, according to the International Data Corporation. Apple’s market share declined from 20% to 17.4% over the same period.

The second reason is that the Pura X is the first to run HarmonyOS 5, the latest version of Huawei’s self-developed operating system. It was initially launched in November as HarmonyOS Next and reportedly no longer uses code from the open-source version of Google’s Android operating system.

This is a significant step by Huawei to remove any ties to Google and Android. In 2019, U.S. sanctions forced Google to stop working with Huawei.

The Pura X is also equipped with Xiaoyi, Huawei’s AI assistant which is underpinned by its own artificial intelligence models as well as those developed by DeepSeek.

SoftBank Group said Wednesday that it will acquire Ampere Computing, a startup that designed an Arm-based server chip, for $6.5 billion. The company expects the deal to close in the second half of 2025, according to a statement.

Carlyle Group and Oracle both have committed to selling their stakes in Ampere, SoftBank said.

Ampere will operate as an independent subsidiary and will keep its headquarters in Santa Clara, California, the statement said.

“Ampere’s expertise in semiconductors and high-performance computing will help accelerate this vision, and deepens our commitment to AI innovation in the United States,” SoftBank Group Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son was quoted as saying in the statement.

The startup has 1,000 semiconductor engineers, SoftBank said in a separate statement.

Chips that use Arm’s instruction set represent an alternative to chips based on the x86 architecture, which Intel and AMD sell. Arm-based chips often consume less energy. Ampere’s founder and CEO, Renee James, established the startup in 2017 after 28 years at Intel, where she rose to the position of president.

Leading cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services offers Graviton Arm chip for rent that have become popular among large customers. In October, Microsoft started selling access to its own Cobalt 100 Arm-based cloud computing instances.

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At the end of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s unscripted two-hour keynote on Tuesday, his message was clear: Get the fastest chips that the company makes.

Speaking at Nvidia’s GTC conference, Huang said that questions clients have about the cost and return on investment the company’s graphics processors, or GPUs, will go away with faster chips that can be digitally sliced and used to serve artificial intelligence to millions of people at the same time.

“Over the next 10 years, because we could see improving performance so dramatically, speed is the best cost-reduction system,” Huang said in a meeting with journalists shortly after his GTC keynote.

The company dedicated 10 minutes during Huang’s speech to explain the economics of faster chips for cloud providers, complete with Huang doing envelope math out loud on each chip’s cost-per-token, a measure of how much it costs to create one unit of AI output.

Huang told reporters that he presented the math because that’s what’s on the mind of hyperscale cloud and AI companies.

The company’s Blackwell Ultra systems, coming out this year, could provide data centers 50 times more revenue than its Hopper systems because it’s so much faster at serving AI to multiple users, Nvidia says. 

Investors worry about whether the four major cloud providers — Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle — could slow down their torrid pace of capital expenditures centered around pricey AI chips. Nvidia doesn’t reveal prices for its AI chips, but analysts say Blackwell can cost $40,000 per GPU.

Already, the four largest cloud providers have bought 3.6 million Blackwell GPUs, under Nvidia’s new convention that counts each Blackwell as 2 GPUs. That’s up from 1.3 million Hopper GPUs, Blackwell’s predecessor, Nvidia said Tuesday. 

The company decided to announce its roadmap for 2027’s Rubin Next and 2028’s Feynman AI chips, Huang said, because cloud customers are already planning expensive data centers and want to know the broad strokes of Nvidia’s plans. 

“We know right now, as we speak, in a couple of years, several hundred billion dollars of AI infrastructure” will be built, Huang said. “You’ve got the budget approved. You got the power approved. You got the land.”

Huang dismissed the notion that custom chips from cloud providers could challenge Nvidia’s GPUs, arguing they’re not flexible enough for fast-moving AI algorithms. He also expressed doubt that many of the recently announced custom AI chips, known within the industry as ASICs, would make it to market.

“A lot of ASICs get canceled,” Huang said. “The ASIC still has to be better than the best.”

Huang said his is focus on making sure those big projects use the latest and greatest Nvidia systems.

“So the question is, what do you want for several $100 billion?” Huang said.

WATCH: CNBC’s full interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang