"U.S. Sanctions Chinese Companies to Order TSMC Chips by proxy to Huawei"

The U.S. Joe Biden administration has decided to sanction a Chinese company suspected of ordering a chip from Taiwan's TSMC found on behalf of Huawei's artificial intelligence and AI processors, Reuters reported on the 20th local time.

According to Reuters, the U.S. government sees China's Sofgo as a cooperative company to Huawei and plans to include it on the list of sanctioned companies, the Entity List.

Earlier in the day, it was revealed that the TSMC chip found in Huawei's Ascend 910B multi-chip system had been ordered by Sofgo.

Semiconductor design firm Sofgo is an affiliate of Bitcoin mining device supplier Bitmain.

Huawei was on the entity's list in 2019, which prompted the U.S. government to ban U.S. companies or companies outside the U.S. from exporting chips to Huawei without a separate license starting in 2020.

SofGo claimed that it had never done business with Huawei, either directly or indirectly, when the matter arose in October.