U.S. President Donald Trump has blocked the proposed sale of Lattice Semiconductor Corp. to a private equity firm backed by Chinese investors, saying the deal “threatens to impair the national security of the United States.”

Lattice, which is based in Hillsboro, Oregon, manufacturers microprocessor chips used in data centers, video devices and industrial equipment. The company had agreed to sell itself last November to private equity firm Canyon Bridge Capital Partners, which has ties to a fund owned by the Chinese government, for $1.3 billion, pending a review by U.S. regulators.

On Wednesday, however, the deal was blocked on the recommendation of a panel of regulators, Bloomberg reported. The White House issued a statement later confirming it had blocked the deal.

“The national-security risk posed by the transaction relates to, among other things, the potential transfer of intellectual property to the foreign acquirer, the Chinese government’s role in supporting this transaction, the importance of semiconductor supply chain integrity to the United States Government, and the use of Lattice products by the United States Government,” the White House said.

Lattice specializes in making field-programmable gate arrays, which are chips geared toward use in artificial intelligence, cloud and edge computing applications, among other things. The chips can be customized in order to boost their performance for specific tasks, making them superior to general-purpose chips that might take up too much space in specialized equipment or run too hot in some cases.

However, Reuters reported that the FPGA chips can also potentially be used in military applications, which seems to be the main reason Trump is opposed to the deal.

“We are obviously disappointed in today’s decision by the President of the United States to forgo what we believe to be an excellent deal for Lattice’s shareholders and its employees by expanding the opportunity to keep jobs in America,” Canyon Bridge said in a statement.

Trump’s decision to block the Lattice deal doesn’t bode well for other proposed acquisitions of U.S. firms by Chinese groups. Other deals currently under review include MoneyGram International Inc.’s proposed sale to Ant Financial, a financial services firm partly owned by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s owner and founder Jack Ma. Another is SkyBridge Capital LLC’s pending sale to Chinese conglomerate HNA Group Co. Skybridge was notably founded by former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who quit the Trump team after just a week in the job.

Only four acquisitions have been blocked by a U.S. president since 1990, Bloomberg said.

Image: Gage Skidmore/Flickr