Chinese and American flags move outside the building of an American company in Beijing, China, on January 21, 2021.
Tingshue Wang | Reuters
WASHINGTON – The Commerce Department on Thursday added seven Chinese supercomputing entities to a U.S. economic blacklist citing national security concerns.
The department blacklisted Tianjin Phytium’s information technologies, Shanghai’s high-performance integrated circuit design center, Sunway Microelectronics, Jinan National Supercomputing Center, Shenzhen National Supercomputing Center, Wuxi National Supercomputing Center and Zhengzhou National Supercomputing Center.
The seven entities were blacklisted for “building supercomputers used by Chinese military actors, their destabilizing military modernization efforts and / or weapons of mass destruction programs.”
U.S. officials have long complained that Chinese companies are forced into the People’s Republic of China and collect sensitive information on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army. The Chinese Communist Party has previously said it does not engage in industrial espionage.
“Supercomputing capabilities are vital to the development of many (perhaps almost all) modern weapons and national security systems, such as nuclear weapons and hypersonic weapons,” U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo wrote in a statement. .
“The Department of Commerce will use its full extent of its authorities to prevent China from leveraging U.S. technologies to support these destabilizing military modernization efforts,” he added.
The new rules, which restrict U.S. exports to the entities in question, go into effect immediately. However, they do not apply to goods from U.S. suppliers that are already en route.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Under former President Donald Trump, the United States added a number of Chinese companies to its economic blacklist, including the country’s largest smartphone maker Huawei, SMIC chip maker and most drone maker. great, SZ DJI Technology.