A hot potato: Few companies are as well-known for being sanctioned as Huawei. The Chinese giant was placed on a trade restrictions list in 2019, limiting its ability to buy US hardware and software, which is why Republican lawmakers are angry at Joe Biden’s administration over the recent launch of the MateBook X Pro – a laptop powered by Intel’s Meteor Lake Core Ultra CPUs.
It was the Donald Trump administration that placed Huawei on the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) Entity List almost five years ago, ensuring that US companies cannot do business with the tech firm without first securing a license.
These export licenses are rarely given out, but the Trump administration granted one to Intel allowing it to ship processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. This has enabled the firm to use the Meteor Lake chips, all the way up to the Core Ultra 9, in the newly unveiled MateBook X Pro. The license is expected to expire later this year and not be renewed.
Allowing Huawei to use Intel’s chips has led to criticism against the Biden administration by some Republican lawmakers, reports Reuters. They say the MateBook X Pro specs suggest the Commerce Department had approved shipments of the recent Intel chips to Huawei.
Republican Congressman Michael Gallagher, who chairs the House of Representatives select committee on China, told Reuters, “One of the greatest mysteries in Washington, DC is why the Department of Commerce continues to allow US technology to be shipped to Huawei”
“These approvals must stop,” Republican congressman Michael McCaul said in a statement. “Two years ago, I was told licenses to Huawei would stop. Today, it doesn’t seem as though the policy has changed.”
Questions regarding the efficacy of the US government’s restrictions on Huawei and China’s access to advanced manufacturing processes arrived late last year following the release of the Mate 60 and its Kirin 9000s chip. The SoC is produced by SMIC on its 7nm process node, which is about 10% behind what TSMC labels as 7nm in terms of transistor density.
The US has implemented tight restrictions on the export of advanced chips designed for AI use to China, leading to Nvidia creating less-powerful versions specifically for the country – something the US government isn’t happy about. While Intel makes a lot of noise regrading the Core Ultra chips’ AI capabilities, they aren’t covered by the these export restrictions, which mostly affect accelerators and the RTX 4090.
