Beijing’s strategic push for semiconductor self-reliance depends heavily on key companies like Huawei — and China just proved how far it will go to defend them.
China added several prominent Western companies to its Unreliable Entity List on Thursday, including the research firm TechInsights. This Canadian company was one of the institutions that revealed Huawei used TSMC to build the Ascend 910B chip despite American sanctions — resulting in a possible $1-billion fine for the Taiwanese chip maker.
According to the announcement by the Ministry of Commerce [machine translated] (via Bloomberg), organizations and individuals within China are prohibited “from engaging in transactions, cooperation, and other activities with the aforementioned entities, especially transmitting data or providing sensitive information to these entities.”
TechInsights and all its subsidiaries across the globe are included in the ban. But what’s interesting is that the research firm has been specifically mentioned in the government announcement, and that most of the other companies on the list are defense contractors and aerospace companies like Elbit Systems of America and BAE Systems. There’s also a smattering of anti-drone companies, like Dedrone and Epirus, which developed the Leonidas microwave system that can take down drone swarms.
“Foreign entities such as Dedrone by Axon and TechInsights and their affiliates have defied China’s strong objections to engage in activities such as so-called military-technical cooperation with Taiwan, made malicious remarks concerning China, and assisted foreign governments in suppressing Chinese companies,” China said in another statement.
It’s understandable for China to add all the other companies to its Unreliable Entity List, especially given that most of them have defense projects and work with the military forces of the nation’s rivals, like the U.S. and Taiwan. But TechInsights isn’t a military or defense contractor — it’s primarily a semiconductor intelligence firm that specializes in reverse engineering and teardowns, plus market analysis.
The primary reason why it may have been added to the list is that it investigated Huawei, one of China’s crown jewels when it comes to tech companies. Although the country’s semiconductor industry has taken strides in recent years, TechInsight’s investigations in 2023 and 2024 revealed Huawei’s reliance on technologies and chips from TSMC, Samsung, and SK hynix, which might’ve contradicted Beijing’s strategic push for semiconductor self-reliance.
Because it’s located outside of China, TechInsights will likely still be able to make teardowns of Chinese tech it can acquire and publish its findings. Still, we’re unsure how China’s announcement will affect its business operations, especially as the company has not released any statement at the time of writing.
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