WASHINGTON (CN) – Ahead of trade talks between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at next week’s G20 Summit in Japan, the U.S. Commerce Department said Friday that it has blacklisted five major Chinese tech companies due to national security concerns.
According to a new filing by the department, five Chinese companies have been added to a growing short list of organizations the U.S. has hit with trade restrictions in recent months.
The latest companies, all involved in supercomputing or microchip processing technology, are barred from purchasing any American-made materials and are prohibited from receiving any government contracts without prior vetting or approval.
Sugon, a prominent Chinese cloud supercomputing company, is on the list as well as military technology conglomerates Higon, Wuxi Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology, Chengdu Haiguang Integrated Circuit and Chengdu Haiguang Microelectronics Technology.
The Commerce Department last added telecommunications giant Huawei to its blacklist last month. The Trump administration, according to The New York Times, also reportedly has its sights on another Chinese corporation, Hikvision. The Chinese video surveillance company has been eyed for restrictions since mid-May.
Sugon and the other organizations are involved in various activities “determined to be contrary to the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States,” the Commerce Department said, including the development of supercomputers for use by China’s military.
The prohibition will be officially logged in the Federal Register on Monday.
President Trump and President Xi are expected to resume trade talks at the G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, on June 28 and 29. It will be the first time the leaders have met since negotiations collapsed last month, triggering a new wave of tariffs on $250 billion in Chinese imports.
Trump has threatened to tack on an additional round of tariffs on another $300 billion of products, but in a tweet Monday he said only that he had a “good telephone conversation with President Xi” and that their respective teams would talk ahead of the meeting in Osaka.
A representative for the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
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