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US blocks export licenses to Huawei.

Sev­eral people famil­iar with the White House said the com­merce depart­ment had noti­fied some com­pan­ies it would no longer grant licences to any group export­ing US tech to Hua­wei. The Trump admin­is­tra­tion in 2019 imposed curbs on export­ing US tech to Hua­wei by adding the group to a black­list

Huawei

called the «entity list». «The actions are partly driven by the fact that Hua­wei as a com­pany is a dif­fer­ent animal than it was four years ago when it was focused on 5G,» said Rasser, a former CIA offi­cial, refer­ring to its expan­sion into areas such as under­sea cables and cloud com­put­ing. The move comes as Hua­wei’s oper­a­tions have sta­bil­ised.

Eric Xu, its rotat­ing chair, said in Decem­ber that 2023 would be the first year in which Hua­wei would return to «busi­ness as usual». Hua­wei secured its sur­vival with a shift to enter­prise and gov­ern­ment busi­ness, espe­cially in China, and its grow­ing cloud busi­ness. The fact the US still allowed some exports to Hua­wei also helped avert a com­plete col­lapse. In addition, Hua­wei is believed to be back­ing projects in China aimed at build­ing an import-inde­pend­ent chip sup­ply chain, efforts that the US has also begun to tar­get.

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