Opinion | How the US president could end Huawei’s global 5G shipments with the stroke of a pen

Six months after it was banned from using US technology, reports surfaced that Huawei Technologies’ new Mate 30 flagship smartphone and its 5G base stations contained zero US parts.

While those broad claims were questioned by some analysts, Huawei had been able to swap out advanced chips from US suppliers like Qualcomm and Xilinx, which were included in the blacklist, and replace them with its own circuit designs that were fabricated by TSMC, a silicon wafer foundry in Taiwan.

As Huawei executives cheered this feat, hardliners in the Trump Administration were fuming that the company had found loopholes to skirt the ban that was supposed to bring it down.

Members of the Trump cabinet had planned to meet this week to discuss imposing tighter restrictions on Huawei’s ability to purchase US-origin technology, which could include the nuclear option of blocking its access to TSMC’s foundry services.

That meeting was reportedly postponed due to coronavirus concerns but the fact remains that the semiconductors Huawei’s products run on cannot be made in high volume without US manufacturing equipment, and the US president can exercise emergency powers to determine who has access to that technology.

The Trump Administration is hell bent on stopping Huawei from dominating the global 5G roll out as it sees the Chinese company as a national security threat with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Huawei has repeatedly denied these claims.