With us or against us

23 July 2019 By Gina Chon Follow @GinaChon

The U.S. president may weigh in on a $10 bln Pentagon contract where Amazon is a lead bidder after rivals slammed the process. He also questioned Google’s China ties and may use Huawei licenses to help or punish others. Targeting firms with fear or favor is a worrying disruption.

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Chief executives from seven tech companies, including Google, Intel, Qualcomm and Broadcom, attended a meeting at the White House on July 22 to discuss U.S. government restrictions on Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei Technologies and other topics.

The White House said the CEOs expressed strong support for President Donald Trump’s Huawei policies, while he agreed that they deserve timely licensing decisions from the Commerce Department. In May, the agency announced that companies would need to obtain licenses to export American-made products to Huawei. White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told Fox News on July 23 that the companies wanted the government to speed up the application process.

On June 29, after meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping, Trump said U.S. companies could resume sales to Huawei, though the details were unclear. This came a month after the company was placed on the entity list.

Separately, Trump said on July 18 that he was seriously considering intervening in a $10 billion Pentagon cloud-computing contract, in which Amazon and Microsoft are lead bidders. Oracle and IBM are among the companies that complained about the bidding process.

On July 16, Trump tweeted that his administration will look at Alphabet unit Google’s ties to China after investor Peter Thiel told Fox News that Chinese intelligence agents may have infiltrated it. The company said in a statement that it does not work with the Chinese military.

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