The Trump administration on Tuesday added 80 companies and organizations to a list of companies that are barred from buying American technology and other exports because of national security concerns.
The move, which targeted primarily Chinese firms, cracks down on companies that have been big buyers of American chips from Nvidia, Intel and AMD. It also closed loopholes that Trump administration officials have long criticized as allowing Chinese firms to continue to advance technologically despite U.S. restrictions.
One company added to the list, Nettrix Information Industry, was the focus of a 2024 investigation by The New York Times that showed how some Chinese executives had bypassed U.S. restrictions aimed at cutting China off from advanced chips to make artificial intelligence.
Nettrix, one of China’s largest makers of computer servers that are used to produce artificial intelligence, was started by a group of former executives from Sugon, a firm that provided advanced computing to the Chinese military and built a system the government used to surveil persecuted minorities in the western Xinjiang region.
In 2019, the United States added Sugon to its “entity list,” restricting exports over national security concerns. The Times investigation found that, six months later, the executives formed Nettrix, using Sugon’s technology and inheriting some of its customers. Times reporters also found that Nettrix’s owners shared a complex in eastern China with Sugon and other related companies.
After Sugon was singled out and restricted by the United States, its longtime partners — Nvidia, Intel and Microsoft — quickly formed ties with Nettrix, the investigation found.
Records obtained through WireScreen, a business intelligence platform, showed that Sugon and Nettrix have links to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a vast research institution that develops chip technology, parts of which the United States has placed under sanctions for national security concerns. Procurement documents indicated that Nettrix had sold servers to universities that host defense laboratories and cybersecurity firms that work with the military and on China’s Great Firewall, among other customers.
The Trump administration added 54 companies and organizations from China to the entity list on Tuesday, as well as more than two dozen from Iran, Pakistan, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan.
The added entities had made contributions to Pakistani nuclear activities and its missile program, advanced China’s quantum technology capabilities and hypersonic weapons development, and tried to circumvent U.S. controls on Iran, among other actions, the administration said.
“We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, said in a statement.
The Trump administration also expanded its penalties on Tuesday to several subsidiaries of Inspur Group, which has been a significant customer of Intel and other U.S. technology firms. The administration said those entities had aided Inspur’s development of supercomputers that were used by the Chinese military, and had tried to acquire U.S. technology in support of that.
The Biden administration added Inspur’s parent company to the entity list in 2023, but after a brief pause, U.S. companies continued to do business with Inspur’s subsidiaries. Inspur Group moved its registered address to a location about a mile away from its parent group in 2023.
Trade experts have said the impact of U.S. entity listings can be easy for companies to dodge, because the entity listing is tied to a specific name and address.
Tuesday’s entity listings together will affect a significant portion of the Chinese market for servers, a type of computer that is necessary to generate artificial intelligence. The Trump administration also added a special designation to its restrictions to expand the penalties globally, which will stop companies from trying to bypass U.S. rules by exporting products to the Chinese firms from countries other than the United States.
The entity list was created under the Clinton administration to prevent adversaries from developing weapons of mass destruction, but presidents have wielded it increasingly aggressively over the past decade.
Other groups added to the list Tuesday included the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, which the administration said was added for trying to acquire A.I. models and chips in support of China’s military modernization.