Huawei Launches First HarmonyOS Desktop With All Chinese Parts

Huawei has launched its first HarmonyOS desktop, the Qingyun HM650 series, and says every part inside it is made in China. The machines were unveiled on November 5 at a HarmonyOS office summit in Wuhan and are aimed at government agencies and companies in China, not regular shoppers.

What is the Huawei Qingyun HM650?

The HM650 is a business desktop that runs HarmonyOS instead of Windows. The range includes the HM650, the HM650g and a higher performance HM650g configuration, all built around Huawei's own Kirin X90 processor, which first appeared in the company's laptops and tablets last year.

Huawei calls it the first desktop in China to be certified as "100 per cent domestic", with the processor, memory modules and other components all sourced at home, according to the South China Morning Post. The paper notes that the exact scope of that certification is unclear.

What hardware does the HarmonyOS desktop use?

The Kirin X90 is a 10 core, 20 thread chip paired with Huawei's Maleoon graphics. It runs at a 40W thermal design power, lower than the 65W to 125W typical of mainstream desktop processors, and Huawei uses a two layer cooling system to keep it running at speed during long workloads.

Other details reported by Huawei Central include a dedicated keyboard key for Huawei's Celia AI assistant and the Star Shield 2.0 security framework, which can flag AI swapped faces and altered voices. The desktop uses LPDDR5 memory with SSD storage, and some versions can add a hard drive.

Huawei has not published a price. The HM650 is sold through enterprise and government channels in China, with no international launch announced.

Why does an all Chinese PC matter?

The launch closes a loop that started in 2024, when Washington revoked the licences that allowed Intel and Qualcomm to sell processors to Huawei. Since then Huawei has replaced both the chip and the operating system in its PCs, first in laptops and now in desktops.

That fits a wider pattern in the US and China tech fight, where chip access has become a policy weapon on both sides. The same week, questions were raised in the US about which Chinese firms received export licences for advanced AI chips, as we reported in our story on Nvidia H200 licences in China.

How big is HarmonyOS on PCs now?

At the Wuhan event, Huawei said more than 21,000 apps now run natively on HarmonyOS PCs, and that over 11,000 of its own employees already use HarmonyOS computers at work. Huawei executive He Gang said most of the company's staff should switch to HarmonyOS PCs by 2027, according to The Economic Observer.

Huawei also opened a partner program that gives other PC makers a HarmonyOS motherboard design, so government buyers will be able to pick machines from more brands than Huawei. We first covered the company's plan to bring its own system to computers when HarmonyOS was confirmed for PCs.

Is this a threat to Windows?

Not outside China, at least for now. The HM650 targets offices that need approved domestic hardware, and HarmonyOS still lacks the long tail of software that Windows users rely on. Inside China, though, government and state company purchases are a large market, and every agency that moves to Huawei desktops is one less buyer for Intel chips and Microsoft licences.

For buyers elsewhere, the more relevant question remains whether current Windows hardware is enough, which we cover in our guide to running Windows 11 on 8GB of RAM.