The Trump administration is adopting stricter policies that will make it even more difficult for Huawei to do business with companies based in the United States.
According Reuters, the Trump administration has notified suppliers, including chip maker Intel, which is revoking certain licenses to sell to Huawei. The Trump administration has also revealed its intentions to reject dozens of other supply requests for the Chinese company.
In 2019, the U.S. Department of Commerce placed Huawei and its subsidiaries on the “Entity List”, preventing many U.S. companies from doing business with the Chinese company. One of the companies affected by this decision was the chip maker Intel, although in late September the Department of Commerce granted Intel a license to supply some products to Huawei. Now, however, that license has been revoked.
Huawei still makes laptops – a few days ago the company announced MateBook X Pro 2021 and MateBook 13/14 2021 – so the latest restriction could hurt the company’s ability to make new PCs. To date, government restrictions Trump was already hampering Huawei’s business. The latest development makes Huawei’s future more uncertain than ever.
Previous restrictions effectively blocked most chip makers from supplying Huawei, preventing the company from having its ARM-based SoC designs manufactured by contracted chip makers like TSMC. As a result, the Kirin 9000 found in the Huawei Mate 40 series is expected to be the company’s last self-engineered Kirin silicon, and the company will have to turn to 4G chipsets from competitors like Qualcomm or wait for China’s semiconductor manufacturing. the industry can intensify.
In the past few months, Huawei has taken steps to decrease its dependence on US-based companies. In November, the company announced that it was selling Honor, a smartphone brand of the Huawei Consumer Business Group, to a consortium of more than 30 agents and resellers. The injection of money can allow the company to become fully independent.
Today’s news comes just days before President Trump’s term ends, with President-elect Joe Biden set to take control. When Trump is no longer president, it remains to be seen whether this and other restrictions will be lifted.