Suppliers to Huawei and top chipmaker SMIC got billions of dollars worth of licenses from November through April to sell them goods and technology despite their being on a U.S. trade blacklist, Reuters reported.
The report said 113 export licenses worth $61 billion were approved for suppliers to ship products to Huawei. The report said 188 licenses valued at nearly $42 billion were okayed for Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC).
The data showed that more than 9 out of 10 license applications were granted to SMIC suppliers while 69 percent of requests to ship to Huawei were approved over the same period.
The U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs committee on Thursday voted to grant a request by its top Republican member Michael McCaul to release the licensing data, which it received from the Commerce Department in May.
Commerce Department said in a statement that the release of an arbitrary snapshot of license approvals risks politicizing the licensing process and misrepresenting the national security determinations made by the government.
It stressed that approved license applications do not represent actual shipments and around half of all licenses are used. License applications involving Huawei and SMIC are processed under policies developed by the Trump administration and maintained by the Biden administration.
Huawei was placed on a trade blacklist in May 2019 over national security concerns, forcing its U.S. suppliers and others to obtain a special license to ship goods to it. SMIC was added to the entity list in December 2020, over fears it could divert advanced technology to military users.
A majority of the licenses granted did not authorize shipments of sensitive items. Of the 113 licenses approved for Huawei during the period, 80 were for non-sensitive items that only required a license because the recipient was blacklisted. For SMIC, the figure was 121 of 188.
Licenses are generally good for four years.
Reuters reported earlier this year that, during the Trump administration, $87 billion worth of licenses for Huawei were approved after it was blacklisted.
