Beijing moved into damage-control mode on Friday, with its foreign ministry dismissing a Reuters report that cited two senior Trump administration officials alleging that SMIC, China’s largest chipmaker, had sent chipmaking tools to Iran, as “false information.”
Asked about the report at a regular news conference in Beijing, foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said he was “not familiar with the situation” and added, “What I can tell you is that recently, some media have been keen on releasing news that seems correct but is actually wrong.”
Jian added that, “after verification, all such reports were found to be false information,” but he did not elaborate further.
The denial underscores just how sensitive Beijing is to headlines featuring Trump administration officials accusing SMIC of sending chipmaking tools to Iran.
“We have no reason to believe that any of this has stopped,” one Trump official told Reuters.
Those allegations build on a separate report about a viral video circulating on X that appears to show a Chinese company mass-producing Shahed-type drones.
One Trump official told the outlet that the SMIC tools sent to Iran could be used in any electronics that require chips.
Reuters noted, “It was not immediately clear what, if any, role the chipmaking tools have played in Iran’s response to the war, which was launched by the U.S. and Israel on February 28.”
What is clear, based on a separate report we first noted in early March, is that an Iranian drone that targeted the British Royal Air Force base at Akrotiri, Cyprus, contained a Russian-made “Kometa” satellite navigation chip using Western-made components.
Just so readers are on the same page, here is the current map of the two modern battlefields in Eurasia overlaid with natural gas pipelines.
Read: “Eurasia Energy War?”
