The Biden Administration has added 14 Chinese companies and two Singaporean organizations to the US Department of Commerce’s Entity List.

Having been added to the list, the companies are now restricted from receiving US goods or technology exports without a license.

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– Thinkstock / Andrea Izzotti

In a statement, the Bureau of Industry and Security accused the sanctioned companies of “acting at the behest of Beijing to further the PRC’s goals of indigenous advanced chip production, which poses a risk to US and allied national security.”

Included in the list of companies is Sophgo, the company that was alleged to have ordered chips from TSMC that matched the one found on Huawei's Ascend 910B.

Sophgo was founded by Micree Zhan in 2019, who - per a report in The Information from October 2024 - indirectly owns more than 20 percent of Sophgo. Zhan is also the co-founder and chair of Bitmain, the largest Bitcoin ASIC designer and a provider of water-cooled crypto mining systems.

After the Department of Commerce opened an investigation in October 2024, Sophgo released a statement denying the accusation, stating that the department’s investigation was not related to the company and that it has “never been engaged in any direct or indirect business relationship with Huawei.”

Huawei has been on the Entity List since 2019.

The updated sanctions list comes in the same week that outgoing President Biden pushed ahead with further export restrictions on AI chips, despite wide-spread push back from the semiconductor industry.

Confirmed on January 13, the Interim Final Rule on Artificial Intelligence Diffusion restricts the access of AI chips and AI model weights to countries not on the US government’s allies and partners list.

However, the legislation has attracted widespread criticism, with fears it may lead to a sharp decrease in the global sales of AI chips.

Nvidia called the Rule “misguided” and said the restrictions threaten to “derail innovation and economic growth worldwide.” Meanwhile, John Neuffer, CEO and president of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), said the policy was being “rushed out the door days before a presidential transition and without any meaningful input from industry.”

The new export rules will now enter into a 120-day consultation period and will be left to the incoming Trump administration to decide whether or not to modify and/or implement the legislation.