Intel survives US sanctions on China: can continue to provide Huawei with chips, but AMD can't

Intel has survived pressure from hundreds of millions of dollars of lost chip sales to Huawei, after Joe Biden put pressure on the company to revoke a license issued by the Trump administration that allows Intel to ship advanced CPUs to Huawei for use inside of their laptops.

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In a new report from Reuters, the outlet says that Biden "has long been under pressure to revoke a license, issued by the Trump administration, that allows Intel to ship advanced central processors to Huawei for use in laptops". The push came from competitor AMD, which said it was unfair that the Ryzen CPU giant couldn't get a license to sell similar chips to Huawei.

Intel retaining its license is a huge deal, as it can continue to sell hundreds of millions of processors to the Chinese giant amid sanctions that stop GPU sales from NVIDIA and AMD. AMD can't sell its Ryzen CPUs to Huawei, but Intel can... I can understand why AMD wouldn't be happy with that, and rightfully so.

• Read more: Baidu turns from NVIDIA AI GPUs, orders Huawei's AI chips after US sanctions
• Read more: Biden admin to expand US regulations from AI GPUs to the DRAM in China
• Read more: US government bans sales of Huawei and ZTE over national security risk

This move has allowed Huawei to control a portion of the laptop market, while data showed that AMD has lost hundreds of millions of dollars worth of potential sales to the Chinese sanctioned company. Republican Senator Marco Rubio called the Biden administration to remove Intel's license to sell chips to Huawei "immediately" after the Reuters report went live.

Rubio said: "No American company, especially those receiving taxpayer funding, should be fueling its innovation".

• Read more: Chinese government, Huawei and ZTE are being investigated, could pose a national security threat