This is a pretty a uncompellling example.
Without citing Huawei specifically, consider some government backed company with tons of cash no practically no IP.
I bet we could go from you and me in a garage, to a pretty high performance ARM compatible SOC in not that many years.
How? First think of how far you can get just by buying everything ARM has to offer including licensing all IP options and technical consulting service options. Instant prettty decent reference implementation.
In parallel we’ve hired 1,000 engineers and scientists to start working on improvements and novel ideas, let by a team on the the best architects on the planet we can woo away by offering each 7 or 8 figure contracts, unlimited first class air travel for family and friends, whatever is necessary based on strategic value.
Competently managed that would provide high probability of a pretty fast ARM chip.
The problem? You can’t win and sustain competitive advantage with just that. It’s performance balanced with so many other factors including power, effificency, overall effecrivenesss of your SOC for given applications etc.
Besides the enormous challenge of all things adding up at once to win, there’s also no guarantee we’d end up with any especially huge amount of novell IP, not just stuff licensed from someone else, that would allow this win advantage to be comfortably sustained for any susbstantial period of time.
They have a lot of smart people doing some interesting stuff, but that particular example I wouldn’t consider very threatening, even if other examples do exist the better make the point.