(ATF) Hawkish members of the US Congress are urging President Joe Biden’s administration to restrict sales of chip-making tools to Chinese companies by taking action similar to that used against telecommunications equipment maker Huawei Technologies Co.
Representative Michael McCaul of Texas and Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, both Republicans, said the rule that requires a licence to sell advanced semiconductors made with US technology to Huawei should also apply to any Chinese company.
This would “ensure US companies as well as those from partner and allied countries are not permitted to sell the communists the rope they will use to hang us all,” they said in a letter to US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
Last year, Washington issued a rule requiring licences for sales of semiconductors to Huawei made overseas with US chip-making equipment, expanding its reach to halt exports to the company.
Huawei was added to the Commerce Department’s “entity list” in 2019 over national security and foreign policy concerns.
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Analysts expected the administration to make some concessions towards the demand. “This is consistent with our view that the Biden administration will focus more on technology export restrictions than investment bans to tackle China’s competition,” Edison Lee, an equity analyst at Jeffries in Hong Kong, said.
US companies such as Qualcomm and MediaTek are unlikely to be allowed to provide 5G chipsets to Chinese companies, including Huawei, Lee added.
Separately, US prosecutors accused Huawei lawyers of breaching a court order by sharing documents from the company’s Iran sanctions-violations case in New York with Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer facing extradition from Canada.
A judge had ruled that thousands of pages of classified documents turned over by the US government to Huawei’s defence lawyers couldn’t be shared with anyone in China or with Meng, but prosecutors said recent filings show she’s had access to them.
In another Huawei development, Romania approved a bill that effectively bars China and Huawei from taking part in development of its 5G network. The US had urged Bucharest to pass the legislation.
With reporting by Reuters
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