The US Department of Defense will remove China’s Xiaomi Corp (小米) from a government blacklist, a court filing showed, clearing the way for any future US investment in the smartphone maker.
The filing stated that the two parties would agree to resolve their ongoing litigation without further contest, bringing to an end a brief and controversial spat between the hardware company and Washington.
Xiaomi did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Photo: Reuters
Earlier this year, the department, under former US president Donald Trump’s administration, designated the firm as having ties to China’s military and placed it on a list that would restrict US investment in the company.
Xiaomi quickly responded by filing a lawsuit against the US government, calling its placement “unlawful and unconstitutional,” and denying any ties to China’s military.
In March, under US President Joe Biden’s administration, a federal judge temporarily blocked enforcement of the blacklisting.
Separately, a senior US senator on Tuesday asked the chief executives of Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc, Seagate Technology PLC and Western Digital Corp if the companies are improperly supplying Huawei Technologies Co (華為) with foreign-produced hard disk drives.
US Senator Roger Wicker, a ranking member of the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, said that a US Department of Commerce regulation last year sought to “tighten Huawei’s ability to procure items that are the direct product of specified US technology or software, such as hard disk drives.”
He said he was engaged “in a fact-finding process ... about whether leading global suppliers of hard disk drives are complying” with the regulation.
Western Digital said in a statement it “stopped shipping to Huawei in mid-September 2020 to comply with new rules issued by the Department of Commerce. We requested a license to ship products to Huawei in September 2020. Our application is still pending.”
The other companies and Huawei did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Wicker asked the companies if they believed the regulation “prohibits shipment of hard disk drives to Huawei or any affiliate without a license” and the status of all license applications to ship covered products to Huawei.
Wicker also copied US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo on the letter and encouraged her to act “against any company found to be circumventing any part” of the rule, saying Huawei poses “serious harm” to national security.
The commerce department’s action in August last year was also aimed at cracking down on its access to commercially available chips. That month, Trump’s administration also added 38 Huawei affiliates in 21 nations to the US government’s economic blacklist, raising the total to 152 affiliates since first adding Huawei in May 2019.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day