Chipmakers Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom and Xilinx have told their employees that they will suspended shipments to Huawei until further notice, Bloomberg reports. Another Bloomberg report says Huawei has stockpiled chips from US suppliers to last it at least three months. The development comes even as the US Commerce Department temporarily eased some of its restrictions on the Chinese company, which it considers a national security risk. Last week, the department had put Huawei and 70 affiliates on a trade blacklist, forbidding them from buying components from US companies without government approval. But yesterday, it temporarily rolled back some of these restrictions by granting Huawei a 90-day license (read it here) to buy American goods in order to maintain existing networks and provide software updates to existing handsets, Reuters reported. The licence allows Huawei to take action “necessary to provide service and support, including software updates or patches, to existing Huawei handsets that were available to the public on or before May 16, 2019.” It is set to expire on August 19. Meanwhile, in its first response since being blacklisted, Huawei told The Verge that it has made "substantial contributions" to Android's development and growth and would continue to provide security updates and after-sales services to all existing smartphones and tablets. What Huawei buys from the four chip makers The temporary, limited reprieve for Huawei came hours after Google effectively cut it off from the Android ecosystem by pulling its Android licence, thus denying it access to proprietary apps such as the PlayStore,…
