Huawei has been on a United States export blacklist since May 2019. It also runs a public patent licensing program, and the posted rate for a consumer-grade Wi-Fi 7 device is fifty cents a unit. On Wednesday, HP took a license. The two companies announced a multiyear global cross-licensing agreement covering certain Huawei Wi-Fi patents, with no financial terms disclosed; the South China Morning Post reported that HP pays a fee to use them in its PCs. HP called the arrangement routine — a standard-essential license of the kind anything that connects to Wi-Fi needs, and not a broader relationship.
Both descriptions are true. Neither mentions direction. The Entity List requires a Commerce Department license before American technology reaches Huawei, and the Bureau of Industry and Security reviews those requests with a presumption of denial. The rule governs what Americans may send to Huawei; nothing in it governs what Huawei may sell to Americans.
Wi-Fi is where that gap has the most money in it. Standard-essential patents cannot be designed around, because a laptop either implements the standard or it does not connect, so a manufacturer takes a license on fair and reasonable terms or meets the holder in court. Huawei took HP to Europe's Unified Patent Court in August 2025 over a Wi-Fi 6 patent. That November, HP joined the Sisvel Wi-Fi 6 pool, roughly 2,000 wireless patents licensed through a single agreement, and the actions against it ended. Huawei was a founding member of that pool, which suggests HP's money has been arriving in Shenzhen for the better part of a year already, with an Italian intermediary in the middle. This week the intermediary came out.
So the business is smaller than it sounds. Huawei's patent licensing brought in about $630 million in 2024, against revenue of CNY862.1 billion — roughly $118 billion, or about half a percent of the company. Huawei also says that over the years it has paid nearly three times more in royalties than it has collected. The fifty-cent rate is one-way and offered subject to reciprocity, and HP is granting patent rights back, so the net may be a fraction of the posted number.
What accumulates is not revenue, it is standing. Huawei held more than 165,000 active patents at the end of 2025, over 30,000 of them granted in the United States, and it has been the world's largest filer of international patent applications for nine years running. It has signed more than 260 license agreements over the past twenty years with companies in Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea. Export controls are written about things that move: chips, tools, machines, cargo. A patent does not move. It sits in the American patent register, and the products walk past it and pay.
The rule governs what Americans may send to Huawei; nothing in it governs what Huawei may sell to Americans.
