China has added a major Canadian research firm to its Unreliable Entity List in a broad retaliatory act that effectively bans Chinese companies and individuals from doing business with the well-known chip analysis outfit after it published foreign components inside Huawei’s advanced chips.
The Ministry of Commerce said in a statement that the measure was needed to safeguard national sovereignty and security as well as development interests. While the notice provided few details, it comes on the heels of a TechInsights “teardown” showing that Huawei’s Ascend 910C AI chip included components made by Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix — indicating how Huawei still relies on foreign technology despite years of U.S.-led export controls.
Why Beijing Pulled the Trigger on the Blacklist Move
The move to label the company as an Unreliable Entity largely severs TechInsights from its customers and supply chain in China, and prohibits any transfer of “sensitive information” to the company. In practice, that means Chinese universities, labs and electronics suppliers will stop working with it, making it harder for the company to secure access to local components, sample devices and know-how that underpin its reverse-engineering work.
The same order identified U.S.-based cyberintelligence company Recorded Future and BAE Systems, Inc., the American subsidiary of the British defence contractor. Putting the companies on a group list suggests that Beijing is expanding its retaliation beyond defense and into commercial research that unearths the composition and sourcing of Chinese technologies.
What TechInsights Discovered Inside Huawei’s AI Silicon
TechInsights’ most recent teardown was of Huawei’s Ascend 910C, a deep learning accelerator that aims to challenge for leadership in training and inference workloads, but is held back by U.S. restrictions. The firm had reported identifying markers and package clues pointing to TSMC’s involvement, as well as memory contents traced back to Samsung and SK Hynix — companies that (at least on paper) have been restricted from shipping advanced parts to Huawei since 2020.
The results are in line with previous TechInsights analyses. In 2025, the company announced that Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro contained a SMIC-manufactured 7nm-class processor and what appeared to be SK Hynix memory components. SK Hynix publicly announced that it had not shipped to Huawei since the sanctions took effect, which would mean that some combination of stockpiles or third-party middlemen made up the difference — exactly the gray zones regulators have been attempting to close.
The Unreliable Entity List — and Its Reach
The Unreliable Entity List, established in 2019, provides Beijing with the means to restrict imports and exports, block transactions and impose penalties. It can prohibit businesses from hiring staff locally, investing in new projects or obtaining government approvals. The risk of noncompliance alone is often sufficient to freeze relationships between Chinese partners and companies on the list.
For Huawei, the designation may offer temporary relief from future high-profile teardowns that batter claims of supply-chain self-reliance. For the wider market, it takes away a prominent source of independent, technically rigorous sourcing intel at a time when visibility into how well Chinese semiconductor development efforts are taking shape is becoming more important.
Export Controls Are Tightening on Both Sides
Since 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security has continuously rewritten China-focused rules pertaining to AI accelerators, advanced memory and chipmaking tools. The Netherlands and Japan have signed on to export restrictions limiting China’s access to advanced lithography, including crucial ASML equipment. Washington has also increased enforcement against resellers rerouting restricted parts through third countries.
But China’s reliance on foreign chips is still huge. In 2023, chip imports dropped 15.4% to about 479.5 billion units and the import value was still near $350 billion, according to the General Administration of Customs. Those figures point both to the force of controls and to the extent of China’s continuing need for foreign technology.
Industry Loss of Visibility and Market Impact
By curtailing TechInsights’ access to Chinese ecosystems, the regime is muzzling one of the world’s most popular teardown labs. Among the users of the firm’s reports are semiconductor strategists, investors and regulators who use them to map provenance of components and assess how quickly Chinese champions can replace foreign inputs. Less transparency will leave it harder to judge the actual impact of export controls.
Meanwhile, Huawei has gained back momentum in smartphones and is pushing deeper into domestic AI infrastructure. Market trackers have recorded a recovery in its shipments and a pickup in demand for its data-center gear inside China’s cloud and public sectors. The question that remains is how much of this newfound strength depends on foreign IP, inventory, back-end supply chain and indirect sourcing.
What to Watch Next for TechInsights and Huawei
Look for TechInsights to reroute work through non-Chinese labs and pipelines as it lets clients assess its compliance. Keep an eye out for U.S. and allied measures to target intermediaries more closely and any new Chinese additions to the Unreliable Entity List against other teardown or supply-chain intelligence firms.
Above all, the scrutiny of Huawei’s next-generation Ascend accelerators and Kirin mobile chips will ramp up. If future analyses continue to show foreign content, the pressure will build for tighter restrictions; if not, it will indicate China’s localization campaign is moving more quickly than many had expected.
