Samm Sacks, a cyber policy fellow at the New America think tank, said the interest in cloud computing reflected the Biden administration’s approach of looking at Chinese influence in the infrastructure of the internet and the digital services that use the web.
“There’s an intent to focus on the whole ecosystem across those layers,” she said.
U.S. efforts to hinder Chinese tech firms have had mixed success. American restrictions on suppliers to Huawei hurt the company’s smartphone business, but efforts to remove Huawei equipment from wireless networks inside the United States continue. The Trump administration forced Grindr’s Chinese owners to sell the app, while efforts to push the Chinese internet giant ByteDance to divest TikTok have been unsuccessful.
The global cloud computing market is substantial, with total public cloud revenues of $544 billion last year, according to Synergy Research Group. In the United States, Chinese companies account for a tiny fraction of the cloud market, despite having data centers in Silicon Valley and Virginia, said John Dinsdale, the chief analyst at Synergy.
But Chinese cloud companies are making inroads in Asia and Latin America. Huawei’s chairman said last year that his company had seen “rapid growth” in its cloud business. In May, Huawei hosted a cloud conference in Indonesia. Alibaba convened a gathering in Mexico last year to promote its cloud products.
Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, said in a statement that he was concerned that while the Federal Communications Commission could bar some Chinese companies from providing telecom services in the United States, those firms had “still been able to offer services like cloud computing.” Mr. Warner wrote legislation that would give the White House more power to police Chinese technology.
In April, nine Republican senators wrote to a group of administration officials encouraging them to investigate and penalize Chinese cloud companies that they said posed a threat to national security, including Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu.
“We urge you to use all available tools to engage in decisive action against these firms,” they said.
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