Huawei’s laptop division effectively ended by US chip ban

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Huawei is back in the headlines today for falling foul of another US chip ban. This time, export licenses for Intel CPUs and chips from Qualcomm have been revoked, essentially stopping its laptop division for now.

It’s not the first time companies have been banned from supplying Huawei. Five years ago, the Chinese company was blacklisted by the U.S. Commerce Department, effectively blocking any US-based company from supplying them.

Then, in 2020, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) declared Huawei to be a national security threat, pretty much banning U.S. telecom companies from using their 5G technology.

The U.K. banned Huawei’s 5G technology at the end of 2020, leading to a slow removal of their tech from the cellular networks.

Huawei now can’t buy chips from Intel or Qualcomm

Intel and Qualcomm had special export licenses worth hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of chip sales, as specific exemptions to the block on sales to Huawei. Now those licenses are gone, revoked this week by the U.S. Commerce Department.

These export licenses have long been a point of contention for rival Advanced Micro Devices, better known as AMD. The other giant x86 CPU chipmaker, who didn’t have an export license, likely lost out on hundreds of millions of dollars of sales.

Now they are gone, and so is Huawei’s rise in the Chinese laptop market. While Chinese companies are developing new CPUs, these are several generations behind current chips.

Huawei will have to work with what it can get for future laptop launches.

Worried about the growing list of companies unable to do business in China? Drop us a line below in the comments, or carry the discussion to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.