On August 26, 2026, Huawei and HP officially announced that they had signed a multi-year global patent cross-licensing agreement. Under the agreement, HP has obtained a license to use several generations of Huawei’s Wi-Fi patents, while Huawei has obtained corresponding patent rights from HP. Both parties stated that the agreement was reached through amicable negotiations.

Huawei is a major contributor to Wi-Fi technology. It was the first to apply OFDMA technology to Wi-Fi 6 and has made significant contributions to core features of Wi-Fi 7, including multi-link operation, multiple RUs per STA, and preamble perforation. On July 19, 2022, Huawei joined the Sisvel Wi-Fi 6 patent pool as a founding member. In 2025, it became a founding member of Sisvel’s Wi-Fi Multimode project, which covers Wi-Fi 7 patents; companies such as Sony, Philips, and ASUS have since joined the project as licensees.

It is reported that this agreement represents a further deepening of the existing cooperation between the two parties. In November 2025, HP obtained a license for Huawei’s Wi-Fi 6 patents through the Wi-Fi 6 patent pool managed by the patent licensing organization Sisvel. Following the signing of this agreement, Wi-Fi 6 patents will continue to be licensed through this patent pool, while patents for earlier generations such as Wi-Fi 4 and Wi-Fi 5 (which are still used in some of HP’s printer products) will transition to a bilateral licensing arrangement.

Huawei stated that, as of the end of 2025, more than 1.6 billion consumer electronics devices worldwide (excluding mobile phones) were using Huawei’s independently developed technologies; over the past 12 months, Huawei added 25 new patent licensees, including 11 Fortune Global 500 companies. To date, Huawei has signed more than 260 patent licensing agreements with major ICT manufacturers in the United States, Europe, Japan, and South Korea. Licensees include vivo, Amazon, Ericsson, OPPO, Nokia, Xiaomi, and Sharp.

Fan Zhiyong, Huawei’s Chief Intellectual Property Officer, stated in a press release, “We are pleased to have reached this global cross-licensing agreement with HP. This agreement is strong evidence of Huawei’s continuous independent innovation at the forefront of information and communications technology. Through patent licensing, Huawei shares its technological innovations with the industry—particularly in the field of standardized technologies—to bring leading technological experiences to consumers worldwide.”

Litigation History

On August 19, 2025, Huawei filed a patent infringement lawsuit against HP and several of its European subsidiaries at the Munich Regional Division of the Unified Patent Court (UPC). The patent in question is the Wi-Fi 6 standard-essential patent EP3611989 (“Method and Apparatus for Transmitting Wireless Local Area Network Information”), with case number UPC_CFI_752/2025;

At the same time, another licensor in the Sisvel Wi-Fi 6 patent pool—the South Korean company Wilus—filed a patent infringement lawsuit against HP in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas;

On November 18, 2025, Sisvel announced that HP had become a licensee of its Wi-Fi 6 patent pool. This agreement not only settled Wilus’s lawsuit but also terminated the lawsuits filed against HP by other licensors in the patent pool, Huawei and Philips;

The cross-licensing agreement signed on August 26, 2026, further deepened this arrangement: Wi-Fi 6 patents continued to be licensed through the patent pool, while earlier-generation patents such as Wi-Fi 4 and 5 were transitioned to bilateral licensing.