Uncle Sam is tightening the screw on the China tech industry by threatening to add SMIC to the Entity List.

SMIC, helped by government support, has just raised $6.6 billion which it wants to spend on improving its process technology. Its best process is 14nm.

When it was raising the money, SMIC warned in the prospectus that: “Our company still relies heavily on foreign chip-production materials and core chip-production equipment.”

Being put on the Entity List would mean that SMIC cannot get the latest manufacturing equipment and so cannot adopt the latest manufacturing processes.

China was hoping that a freshly capitalised SMIC could solve its problem of  having some of its  major tech companies locked out of the world’s best chip processes.

If America decides to ban equipment sales to SMIC then that hope is gone.

Meanwhile Samsung has just bagged up a $6.6 billion order from Verizon for 5G equipment – an order which would very likely have gone to Huawei if it hadn’t been banned from US markets.