Two of the most important companies behind China’s semiconductor self-sufficiency and AI supremacy hopes were dealt a blow on Saturday, with their addition to Taiwan’s strategic high-tech commodities entity list. Huawei and SMIC have already been sanctioned by the U.S. but the constriction of supplies from the Silicon Island could prove very meaningful, and impactful. This news also comes in the wake of TSMC being deceived into supplying chiplets to Huawei. Hopefully, stricter government controls will prevent any more similar mistakes.

The move by Taiwan’s democratically elected government, specifically the Taiwan Commerce Ministry, isn’t really surprising given the ongoing trade war sparked by concerns over the weaponizing of cutting edge technologies against western allies. From now on, both Huawei and SMIC will need to arrange export permits with any suppliers based in Taiwan, in order to receive manufactured goods.

As entries on Taiwan’s blacklist, Huawei and SMIC are nestled among entities such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as a smorgasbord of other companies and organizations hailing from pariah nations like Iran, Russia, Afghanistan, and North Korea. According to sources like Bloomberg and Taiwan’s CNA, neither the newly blacklisted Chinese companies, not Taiwan’s economy ministry have shared comments on the new list.

Back in November, the U.S. requested that TSMC halted supplies of a range of advanced chips to Chinese customers. We also reported on a huge fine being levied upon TSMC for unknowingly supplying Huawei compute chiplets for its Ascend 910-series AI processor. This weekend’s updated entity list might have been precipitated by negations about such matters behind closed doors.

Taiwan is home to not only the most famous element of the silicon-shield, TSMC, but a host of other key semiconductor firms working on everything from materials, through to advanced packaging. It isn’t just TSMC products that may be cut off from Huawei and SMIC, exports from established industry players like UMC , ASE, SPIL, Nanya , and others will all be subject to the new restrictions.

Tom’s Hardware also frequently reports on Taiwan’s PC industry players, which form the backbone of the industry – the likes of Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and so on.

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