Inside Ox Horn: Huawei’s futuristic China tech hub

Last month, Mobile World Live (MWL) was invited to tour Huawei’s Ox Horn Campus near the South-Eastern city of Shenzhen, China, uncovering the vendor’s vast R&D engine and sprawling campus.

Sitting on the shores of Songshan Lake in Dongguan, Huawei’s 300-acre Ox Horn Campus opened in 2018 and is divided into 12 zones modelled after European towns and cities including Budapest, Prague, Oxford and Burgundy. With lifelike European architecture, iconic landmarks and lakeside lawns, the site blends leisure with function. While employees can enjoy an impressive array of facilities including restaurants, libraries, hotels, an art gallery and even an on-campus tram system, the immersive facility unexpectedly houses the company’s most intensive research programmes.

Alan Fan (pictured), head of Huawei’s intellectual property rights department, told MWL: “At our core, we are an innovation company. Our sustained investment in R&D, protected and propelled by a robust IPR framework, is what fuels our progress.”

The tour moved between several of the village clusters, with research teams spread across multiple buildings that combine offices, labs, meeting halls and research units. The Ox Horn campus brings together teams working across computing, AI, optical networks, wireless systems and intelligent driving.

The company’s R&D efforts span foundational mathematical logic, algorithm theory, core signal-processing frameworks and applied domains such as advanced wireless communications, optical networking and systems integration. Within wireless research, Huawei pointed to advanced work in areas such as massive MIMO and AI-assisted radio resource management, all aimed at improving spectrum efficiency and network coverage.

AI and computing form a major pillar of the vendor’s innovation. Huawei continues to invest heavily in its computing platforms, with research covering model training, inference efficiency and distributed computing architectures. These efforts underpin the company’s wider push into AI across networks, cloud infrastructure, devices and automotive platforms.

According to Fan, the company’s intense research focus is what “drives us toward our goal to build a fully connected, intelligent world and deliver greater value for customers and society”.

Innovation in action
During the visit, Huawei pointed to a number of industrial deployments born from its innovation efforts. One example is its work with Tianjin Port in China, where the company’s Smart Port Solution, integrating technology including intelligent twins, autonomous driving, 5G, cloud computing and IoT, created a centralised autonomous system connecting the various port functions. “We created a next-generation ‘intelligent port brain’,” noted Yang Rong, General Manager of Tianjin Port Second Container Terminal Co, adding it optimised loading plans, equipment management and dispatch services. Huawei claims the port houses “the largest driverless fleet seen to date, comprised of 76 vehicles”.

Meanwhile, at the Yimin open-pit mine in Inner Mongolia, a fleet of 100 autonomous electric mining trucks powered by Huawei’s 5G-Advanced network entered large-scale operation earlier this year. Operating under extreme conditions, the vehicles are supported by speeds of 500 Mb/s uplink and low latency to enable continuous, coordinated fleet operation, real-time 8K video transmission and remote truck control.

Separately, Huawei’s Pangu AI models, slated for copying rival AI models earlier this year, now support more than 400 scenarios across over 30 industries. In intelligent driving, vehicles powered by its advanced driving system travelled more than 1.4 billion kilometres with assisted driving activated in 2024.

R&D ambitions
Indeed, Huawei’s latest R&D numbers reflects the scale ambition of its ambitions. In 2024, Huawei invested CNY179.7 billion ($25.5 billion), or 20.8 per cent of total revenue, while cumulative R&D investment over the past decade has now surpassed CNY1.2 trillion. More than 113,000 employees, or 54.1 per cent of the workforce, are engaged in R&D roles.

The company also remains one of the world’s largest patent holders, with more than 150,000 active granted patents globally. At its Innovation and Intellectual Property Forum in Beijing last month, the company revealed it raked in $630 million in patent licensing revenue.

Huawei’s research push continues despite ongoing pressure from US export controls, which have limited its access to advanced manufacturing tools and partners.

Chief legal officer Liuping Song acknowledged the impact during a media roundtable, noting the company’s chip production “has been affected” and that its process technology will “remain behind the industry” for some time.

He stressed the company is prioritising end-to-end capability over any single component, arguing that customers ultimately care about the performance of the entire computing cluster rather than individual chips, adding Huawei’s strengths in connectivity can offset manufacturing constraints.

Looking ahead, Fan said the company expects its patent revenue to rise in 2026, pointing to increased “recognition in the industry of our technologies”, including Wi-Fi, 5G, audio and video.