US Senators: Biden Should Sanction Huawei and Other Chinese Companies

(Patria) - A group of nine Republican senators have called on the Biden administration to impose sanctions on Huawei Cloud and other Chinese cloud service providers, citing national security concerns.

In a letter sent by Senator Bill Hagerty to the Departments of Commerce, State, and Treasury, it is stated that Chinese cloud computing companies are "increasingly working with foreign entities, in some cases sanctioned foreign entities, that directly challenge the national security and economic security interests of the United States and our allies and partners," Reuters reported.

The senators said that Huawei Cloud launched its "Sky Computing Constellation" in co-sponsorship with the Changsha Tianyi Space Science and Technology Research Institute, also known as "Spacety China" in 2021. They noted that Spacety was "recently sanctioned by the Treasury Department for providing significant satellite imagery assistance to entities in the Russian Federation."

In May 2019, the Department of Commerce added Huawei to its entity list due to US security concerns. The company denies posing a security risk.

"We urge you to use all available tools and take decisive action against these firms, through sanctions, export controls, and investment bans, and to further investigate companies engaged in providing cloud computing services from the PRC," the letter signed by Senators Thom Tillis, Marco Rubio, Steve Daines, Ted Cruz, Joni Ernst, Katie Britt, Kevin Cramer, and Dan Sullivan reads.

They are asking the Biden administration to add Alibaba Cloud to the Commerce Department's export control list, arguing that its close ties to the Chinese military "pose a continuing threat to national security," and that the Treasury Department should add Alibaba Cloud to the list of companies involved in the Chinese military-industrial complex. They further state that Alibaba opened two cloud data centers in Santa Clara, California in 2015.
The letter states that the Biden administration should consider further investigation or action against other Chinese cloud service providers, including Baidu Cloud and Tencent Cloud, that may affect US national security.

The Trump administration issued a warning in August 2020 to Chinese cloud providers, including Alibaba, "to prevent the most sensitive personal data of U.S. citizens and the most valuable intellectual property of our companies... from being stored and processed on cloud-based systems accessible to our foreign adversaries."