Ask most people what Huawei sells and you might hear smartphones, or 5G, or a decade of geopolitical argument. Almost nobody mentions solar inverters. But Huawei Digital Power Technology, the division that makes them, along with battery storage systems and electric-vehicle charging equipment, booked 68.7bn yuan of revenue in 2025, up 38% year on year.
Tesla’s energy division booked $16.8bn in 2025. At the current exchange rate, Huawei Digital Power’s revenue comes to roughly $9.5bn, which means it is now larger than Tesla Energy was in 2023. At present growth rates, it will surpass Tesla’s own energy revenue in 2026 or early 2027.
The comparison is not idle. Tesla is flattered by it. Musk talks about Tesla Energy as a business that could eventually match automotive. It gets headlines, investor attention, and a great deal of social media discussion. Huawei’s is discussed by procurement managers.
Some of that asymmetry is structural. Huawei is unlisted, employee-owned, and reports once a year in a document that runs to several hundred pages, of which Digital Energy occupies a line.
The group as a whole booked 880.9bn yuan of revenue and 68bn yuan of net profit in 2025, which means the energy business is roughly 8% of the total and would still be a large company if it were spun out tomorrow.
Some of it is that the West stopped looking. Huawei has been shut out of telecoms networks across much of Europe and North America on national security grounds, and the reflex that follows a ban is to assume the company shrank. It did not.
It went sideways, into the equipment layer of the energy transition, where the political temperature is lower and the margins are decent.
Solar inverters are a good business to be quietly huge in. They’re unglamorous, standards-driven, and hard to displace once installed, and they sit at the point where a solar array meets the grid, which is to say at the point where the intelligence is.
What the annual report does not do is break the division into product lines. How much of the 68.7bn yuan comes from inverters versus storage systems or charging infrastructure is not disclosed, and neither is the unit’s profit. Investors in any listed competitor would revolt. Huawei has no investors to revolt.
The growth is coming from places that are not America or Europe. Brazil in particular has become central, and Huawei signed a partnership with SECPower in December to expand energy storage there, timed to a new Brazilian law that introduced an hourly competitive mechanism and widened incentives for storage.
Africa is the other pillar, where Huawei has leaned on localised services to build out installed base.
None of this happens in a vacuum. Chinese manufacturers already dominate the panels themselves, to the point that Europe has been stockpiling €7bn of Chinese solar in the name of energy security, an argument that eats its own tail if you stare at it for long enough.
Beijing, meanwhile, is looking to wire renewable generation directly into its data centres, and Europe is discovering the hard way, as in Denmark’s pause on grid connections, that AI load and clean energy do not automatically arrive in the same place at the same time.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched China’s industrial climb in solar, batteries, and electric vehicles.
Enter a hardware category that Western companies consider low-margin plumbing, take volume, take standards, take the installed base, and then realize that the plumbing was the strategic asset all along.
