US adds dozens of Chinese entities to export blacklist, including Inspur units – BusinessWorld OnlineWASHINGTON – The United States on March 25 added six subsidiaries of Inspur Group, China’s leading cloud computing and big data services provider, and dozens of other Chinese entities to its export blacklist.
The Commerce Department said in a post that Inspur units were listed for contributing to the development of supercomputers for the Chinese military. Five of the subsidiaries are located in China and one in Taiwan. Inspur Group itself was added to the list in 2023.
Inspur units are among about 80 companies and entities added to the export control list on March 25. More than 50 are located in China. The others are located in Taiwan, Iran, Pakistan, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.
The listings will limit China’s ability to develop high-performance computing capabilities, quantum technologies and advanced AI, and prevent China from developing a hypersonic weapons program.
“We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to strengthen their own forces and threaten American lives,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said.
In response to an inquiry on March 26, China’s Foreign Ministry condemned the US move and said the country would take necessary measures to protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington said on March 25 that it “strongly opposes these actions by the United States and calls on the United States to immediately stop using military-related issues as a pretext to politicize, instrumentalize and weaponize trade and technology issues.”
The Inspur Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The United States is also seeking to disrupt Iran’s purchase of drones and related defense materials, and to prevent its development of a ballistic missile program and unsafe nuclear activities.
The government adds companies to the Commerce Department’s Entity List for national security or foreign policy concerns. Companies on the list cannot sell goods to those without applying for and obtaining licenses, and are subject to denials.
The administration’s goal is to “prevent the misuse of U.S. technologies and goods for high-performance computing, hypersonic missiles, military aircraft training, and UAVs (drones) that threaten our national security,” Commerce Secretary Jeffrey Kessler said.
When Inspur Group was added to the list in 2023, executives from AMD and Nvidia were questioned about their dealings with the company. At the time, chip industry insiders and their advisors said the companies were trying to assess whether they had to stop supplying Inspur’s affiliates.
Reuters could not immediately determine whether the U.S. companies continued to do business with the affiliates.
Nvidia declined to comment, and AMD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Chinese companies Nettrix Information Industry, Suma Technology and Suma-USI Electronics are among the other companies added to the list. The United States said they were added to help develop Chinese exascale supercomputers that can process large amounts of data at very high speeds and perform large-scale simulations.
The Commerce Department said the companies also provided manufacturing capabilities to Sugon, also known as Dawning Information Industry, a computer server maker that was added to the list of entities in 2019 to build supercomputers used by the military.
The companies could not immediately be reached for comment.
Other companies were added to the list for acquiring U.S.-origin items to advance China’s quantum technology capabilities and selling products to other designated parties, including Huawei, the technology conglomerate seen as the centerpiece of China’s artificial intelligence ambitions.
The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, a Chinese non-profit new research and development institute that was also targeted by the United States, said on March 26 that it was shocked and called on the relevant US departments to withdraw the “wrong” decision.
