At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the company demonstrated its new server motherboards with all chips covered with disguising tape and coolers to hide the suppliers.

One of the boards (marked at GFMPUB Ver. A) not only conceals logic chips using a radiator or tape, but even hides the supplier of the memory ICs. Another board, which looks like a prototype of a 4-way server motherboard, not only conceals the markings on some of the chips, but even does not carry processors. 

Suppliers wanting to flog gear to Huawei need to get licenses from the US Department of Commerce, but this is not easy and Huawei likely has to buy chips on the grey market or use complicated means to get hardware.

It is possible that Huawei has been hiding chips that it uses to conceal trade secrets from competitors.