Since the National Football League (NFL) regular season kicked off this week, we can use a football analogy for this story. Let’s say that a football team-let’s call them Huawei-was about to win the Super Bowl scoring a touchdown on the last play of the game. But just as Huawei was celebrating, Red, White, and Blue penalty flags were tossed on the field by the officials negating the touchdown and forcing Huawei to lose the game.
Huawei lost the ability to buy cutting-edge chips exactly one year after being placed on the Entity List
Exactly one year later to the day, the U.S. Commerce Department changed U.S. export rules that prevents foundries using U.S. technology from shipping cutting-edge chips to Huawei. As a result Huawei’s latest two flagship series (last year’s photographic-focused P50 line and the recently unveiled Mate 50 line) use 4G-only versions of the top-of-the-line Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets.
The Huawei Mate 50 Pro
Alan Estevez, the Commerce undersecretary for industry and security, said, “U.S. stakeholders need to be fully engaged in international standards organizations, particularly where the critical but sometimes invisible standards that they set have important national security as well as commercial implications.” But to prevent these American firms from having to apply for a license every time that they are part of an organization setting global tech standards, the Commerce Department is relaxing the restrictions about sharing tech with blacklisted firms like Huawei.
The U.S. doesn’t want to give up its leadership role in technology
The U.S. doesn’t want to lose its leadership role in technology and one way to make sure that this doesn’t happen is to allow restricted firms to have access to needed American technology. The Commerce Department has yet to release a list of the technologies that it will allow companies like Huawei to share.
