Huawei Launches Tiangong Initiative with $141 Million Investment in HarmonyOS AI Ecosystem

Key takeaways

Chinese technology giant Huawei Technologies has unveiled its ambitious Tiangong Project, committing 1 billion yuan ($141 million) in funding and resources to accelerate innovation within its HarmonyOS AI ecosystem.

The announcement was made at Huawei Connect 2025, the company's annual flagship technology conference held in Shanghai from September 18-20.

Major investment in AI ecosystem development

The Tiangong Project represents Huawei's strategic push to establish HarmonyOS as a comprehensive AI-powered platform that can compete with established mobile operating systems.

The investment will specifically target the development of AI meta-services, intention frameworks, and intelligent agents designed to work seamlessly across Huawei's device ecosystem.

Zhu Yonggang, President of Huawei Terminal Cloud Services, said, "The rapid growth of the Harmony ecosystem is a collective charge of collaborative innovation in China's technology industry. Huawei, together with its partners and developers, has turned the impossible into reality."

The initiative comes as Huawei announced that the number of terminal devices running HarmonyOS 5 has exceeded 17 million, demonstrating significant adoption since the operating system's latest iteration was launched.

HarmonyOS Ecosystem expansion

The Harmony ecosystem is an ecosystem built and shared based on OpenHarmony.

Since OpenHarmony was open-sourced five years ago, it has had over 130 million lines of code, more than 9,200 community contributors, and launched over 1,300 hardware and software products and more than 70 industry distributions, covering fields such as finance, transportation, education, energy, aerospace, and consumer electronics.

The company has integrated HarmonyOS 5 across its entire terminal product portfolio this year, including smartphones, computers, tablets, smartwatches, and smart screens. This comprehensive deployment enables what Huawei calls "full-scenario intelligent experiences" that break traditional device boundaries.

Advanced AI agent capabilities

Central to the Tiangong Project is the development of sophisticated AI agents that can autonomously handle complex tasks.

The Xiaoyi Task Space function, currently under testing, can autonomously schedule more than 120 docking tools and third-party agents, covering eight major categories of high-frequency scenarios such as office writing, travel planning, and creative planning, to achieve automatic processing of complex tasks from A to A.

For example, in the office writing scenario, Xiaoyi can generate a 10,000-word report with pictures and text in about 20 minutes.

The initiative also emphasizes user feedback integration, with Huawei reporting that it has received more than 10 million user suggestions, and over 96% of them have achieved a rapid closed-loop.

Strategic context and future outlook

The Tiangong Project announcement comes at a critical time for Huawei as it works to establish HarmonyOS as a viable alternative to Android and iOS in global markets. Following U.S. sanctions that restricted the company's access to Google Mobile Services, Huawei has accelerated its efforts to build a self-sufficient software ecosystem.

The investment represents part of Huawei's broader "All Intelligence" strategy, which seeks to integrate AI capabilities across all aspects of its technology stack. This approach aims to differentiate HarmonyOS through native AI integration rather than relying on add-on AI features.

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