• Action also affects units in UAE, Iran, South Africa
• Beijing slams ‘weaponisation’ of trade and technology

WASHINGTON: The United States has added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, its commerce department said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence and advanced computing capabilities.

The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, Taiwan, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Iran and South Africa, with the department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.”

Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorisation.

“We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” said US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Beijing condemned the blacklisting of its firms, accusing Washington of “weaponising” trade and technology in a “typical act of hegemonism”.

“We urge the US side to stop generalising the concept of national security… and stop abusing all kinds of sanctions lists to unreasonably suppress Chinese enterprises,” foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said at a daily news conference.

China would take “necessary measures” to defend its firms’ rights, Guo added.

The US has added six subsidiaries of Inspur Group, China’s leading cloud computing and big data service provider, and dozens of other Chinese entities to its export restriction list.

The Inspur units were listed for contributing to the development of supercomputers for the Chinese military, the US commerce department said in a posting.

The Inspur units are among about 80 companies and institutes added to the export control list. Over 50 are based in China, while others are in Taiwan, Iran, Pakistan, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.

The listings are intended to restrict China’s ability to develop high-performance computing capabilities, quantum technologies and advanced AI, and impede China’s development of its hypersonic weapons programme.

China’s foreign ministry, in response to an enquiry on Wednesday, condemned the US move and said the country will take necessary measures to safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises.

The Chinese embassy in Washington said it firmly opposed “these acts taken by the US and demand that it immediately stop using military-related issues as pretexts to politicise, instrumentalise and weaponise trade and tech issues.”

US commerce official Jeffrey Kessler said the administration aims to prevent “US technologies and goods from being misused for high performance computing, hypersonic missiles, military aircraft training, and UAVs (drones) that threaten our national security.”

When Inspur Group was placed on 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 advisers said firms were trying to assess whether they had to halt supplying Inspur’s subsidiaries.

Reuters could not immediately determine whether the US companies continued to do business with the subsidiaries.

Nvidia declined to comment, and AMD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Chinese firms Nettrix Information Industry Co, Suma Technology Co and Suma-USI Electronics are among the other companies added to the list. The US said they were added for helping develop Chinese exa-scale supercomputers, which can process vast amounts of data at very high speeds and conduct large-scale simulations.

The companies also provided manufacturing capabilities to Sugon, also known as Dawning Information Industry Co, a computer server manufacturer added to the Entity List in 2019 for building supercomputers used by the military, the US said.

Published in Dawn, March 27th, 2025