The U.S. Commerce Department has reportedly revoked export licenses that allowed Intel Corp. and Qualcomm Inc. to sell chips to Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.

The Financial Times and Bloomberg reported the development today, citing sources familiar with the move. The Commerce Department confirmed in a statement that it has revoked certain licenses for chip sales to Huawei. 

“We continuously assess how our controls can best protect our national security and foreign policy interests, taking into consideration a constantly changing threat environment and technological landscape,” a Commerce Department spokesperson said. “As part of this process, as we have done in the past, we sometimes revoke export licences.”

The move reportedly affects licenses that covered the sale of laptop and handset processors. The MateBook X Pro, a laptop that Huawei debuted in mid-April, uses a central processing unit from the Intel Core Ultra 9 chip series. The introduction of the device reportedly prompted some lawmakers to call for the cancellation of chip export licenses to the company.

Intel in April projected that its revenue in the current fiscal quarter would range from $12.5 billion to $13.5 billion. In a regulatory filing today, the chipmaker said that sales will likely fall below the midpoint of that range because of the export license cancellation.

Bloomberg analysts estimate that Huawei isn’t among Intel’s top 10 customers. The same is believed to be true for Qualcomm, the other company reportedly affected by the Commerce Department’s export license revocations. Qualcomm had earlier stated that the revenue it generates from chip sales to Huawei is limited and will shrink to zero in the near future.

The license cancellations represent the latest in a series of curbs that Commerce has placed on the sale of semiconductor technologies to China. In 2022, Commerce introduced rules that prohibit U.S. companies from exporting advanced artificial intelligence accelerators to China and Russia. Those restrictions also cover multiple types of chipmaking equipment.

Beyond curbing hardware exports, Commerce’s 2022 rules bar affected companies from servicing chipmaking equipment sold to China before the regulation went into affect. Last month, Reuters reported that U.S. officials are urging the Netherlands, Japan and South Korea to implement a similar curb on the delivery of maintenance services.

A separate Reuters report from this morning indicates that another set of export restrictions could potentially follow suit. In particular, Commerce is said to be weighing rules that would ban the sale of some proprietary AI models to China. It’s believed AI models will only be affected by the potential export restrictions if the amount of computing power used to train them exceeds a certain threshold.

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