As of Monday, March 6, 2023, the US ban list for China also includes major server maker Inspur and CPU developer Loongson. Inspur, as the third largest server manufacturer in the world after Dell and HP, is likely to feel the effects, although their largest market has always been China.
Inspur delivers western servers for China
Inspur is a classic server distributor: the technology comes from others, they are screwed together in Asia and brought to the market. The company had developed a very good reputation in recent years and is considered an alternative to the industry giants in some areas. Mainly Xeon CPUs from Intel and accelerator cards from Nvidia were installed, but AMD has also been used more and more recently.
But the proximity to the Chinese military and the infrastructure around it now earns them an entry on the US “Entity List”. Ultimately, that doesn’t come as a surprise: the company was already on a list by the US Department of Defense in 2020 because it suspected it had ties to the military. Intel then stopped shipping processors for a short time, but resumed a short time later when Inspur was not included in the final version.
Inspur's main customers are in China: Baidu and Tencent take many servers from the company. But the most important suppliers are in the USA, above all Intel and Nvidia. Inspur last published global supplier figures in 2019; Intel was in 1st place with a 37.5 percent share, Nvidia in 2nd place with just under 8 percent of the share of Inspur spending. This has recently prompted Nvidia to produce special slimmed-down “China products”, but the company still expects a significant drop in sales.
Loongson CPUs are also affected< /h2>
Loongson is an important CPU developer in China, but the performance of the solutions has not yet caught up with the West. Most recently, the Communist Party banned the export of processors from the Loongson family, which are said to be “military grade”, because the chips are too important for their own systems. The entry on the US list was therefore obvious.
A total of 38 entries were added to the updated Entity List, 28 of which can be found in China.