Chinese tech giant Huawei said it would soon be able to match cutting-edge Western chipmaking processes, a potential coup for Beijing in the AI race with Washington.

Current high-end Chinese semiconductors are believed to fall well short of the world’s most advanced chips, which are largely designed by US firms and built in Taiwan.

The Chinese firm did not provide full details of its plans, but said it had developed a workaround to combat US sanctions restricting its access to high-tech chipmaking equipment, one which a company executive said was “feasible and affordable” and that Huawei said relied on an entirely new principle in chipmaking that would unseat Moore’s Law — a decades-old predictor of shrinking transistors.