Huawei Technologies goes to trial in New York on criminal charges
The Chinese tech giant faces a federal racketeering and fraud trial that could stretch six months, stemming from a 2018 indictment alleging sanctions violations and trade secret theft.
Huawei Technologies, the world’s largest telecom equipment maker, is now sitting in a Brooklyn courtroom facing criminal charges that have been hanging over the company for the better part of a decade. Jury selection began on September 8 in the Eastern District of New York, kicking off what’s expected to be a three-to-six month trial.
The company, which reported $127 billion in revenue in 2025 and operates in over 170 countries, has pleaded not guilty to between 12 and 14 counts.
What Huawei is actually accused of
The original indictment, handed down in 2018 as part of the Trump administration’s China Initiative targeting corporate espionage, paints a picture of a company operating as a racketeering enterprise.
At the heart of the case are two main threads. First, prosecutors allege Huawei used a Hong Kong shell company called Skycom to push more than $100 million in US dollar transactions through the banking system in violation of sanctions on Iran. Second, the government claims Huawei engaged in a conspiracy to steal trade secrets from American companies.
One of the more colorful allegations involves a T-Mobile robot arm. The specifics of that incident are central to the trade-secret theft charges, which accuse Huawei of systematically targeting US intellectual property.
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The indictment also references Huawei’s operations connected to North Korea. Charges were trimmed slightly before the trial began, bringing the count down from the original filing, but the core allegations remain intact.
The long road to the courtroom
US District Judge Ann Marie Donnelly ruled on July 2, 2025, to dismiss most of Huawei’s motions seeking to throw out the case. The company had argued, among other things, that the prosecution was politically motivated.
The case is inextricably linked to Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and daughter of the company’s founder. Meng was detained in Canada in 2018 at the request of US authorities, sparking a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Ottawa that included the retaliatory detention of two Canadian citizens. She was released in 2021 after reaching a deferred prosecution agreement. She is not a defendant in this trial.