United States: Inspur, China's Top Server Maker, Is Blacklisted by The US Government

The US Department of Commerce's "Entity List" bans US corporations from interacting with Chinese server company Inspur. Inspur, one of the oldest Chinese IT businesses, has close relationships with western tech giants, particularly hyper-scale cloud providers. Inspur is the world's third-largest server manufacturer and China's largest. It participates in the Open Compute Project. The company supplies Chinese enterprises through collaborative partnerships with IBM and Cisco and its own cloud platform. In 2005, Microsoft invested $20 million in the firm, which provides hyper-scale data centers worldwide. 

In March 2022, Inspur established a partnership with JD Cloud to provide liquid-cooled servers, and last month, it stated that Baidu was a major customer. Tencent, Alibaba, and China Mobile are some of its prominent Chinese consumers. Nvidia calls the firm "excellent" and "vital to providing the newest AI technology to all our clients," while Intel is a significant supplier. American corporations can ask for exclusions from the blacklist, although depending on the restrictions, this may be difficult or impossible. 

In 2020, the US Department of Defense tied Inspur to the Chinese military, halting Intel chip sales. Sales resumed since the DoD list had no sanctions. 

President Biden prohibited US citizens and corporations from investing in Inspur the following year. The latest sanctions dropped Inspur Electronic Information Industry Co. shares by 10%. Inspur said it was reviewing the sanctions but did not comment. The Entity List added 28 corporations. Loongson, the corporation behind the anticipated LoongArch microarchitecture employed by the Chinese military and businesses, was noted. As the US shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon earlier this year, six high-altitude balloon companies were banned.