Report: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are among American tech companies providing web services to blacklisted Chinese surveillance firms like Dahua, Hikvision
- Amazon, Microsoft and Google are among a number of American firms that are providing various web services to blacklisted Chinese surveillance firms, a new report claims.
Context & Ripple Effects
The story closes a loop that opened a year earlier, when sources said the US was weighing adding Hikvision and Dahua to the Entity List to cut them off from American technology. The new report claims that even after blacklisting, the firms still receive web services from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — meaning the cutoff exists on paper more than in practice.
It also extends a documented pattern: BuzzFeed reported in 2019 that Apple, Google, and Amazon were distributing apps and products from Chinese firms accused of abetting human rights abuses, and TechCrunch later found over 100 US municipalities buying Hikvision and Dahua systems despite the sanctions. Blacklisting has so far failed to sever either direction of the commercial relationship.
First-order effects
- Amazon, Microsoft, and Google now face direct questions over whether providing cloud and web services to Entity List companies like Dahua and Hikvision complies with US export restrictions — a compliance and reputational exposure each must answer for.
Second-order effects
- If Washington treats cloud services as covered 'US tech,' the three providers would have to terminate or restrict those accounts, while other American vendors serving the blacklisted firms race to audit their own customer lists before being named next.
Third-order effects
- The gap between designation and enforcement points toward regulators extending Entity List rules beyond hardware sales to services and software — making cloud infrastructure itself an instrument of trade policy rather than neutral plumbing.
The trend: US export-control blacklists are colliding with the reality that American cloud platforms remain deeply embedded in sanctioned Chinese supply chains, pushing services into the center of tech geopolitics.