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Silicon Valley semiconductor giants Intel and Nvidia are deeply enmeshed in China’s repression of its Uyghur minority, despite their insistence that they don’t know about or shouldn’t be held responsible for the end-use of mass surveillance systems with their advanced computer chips, a SpyTalk analysis finds.

The typically close technical coordination between chip makers and system builders make it unlikely that actual end-use and end-user identity—mass surveillance of Xinjiang’s Uyghur population by China’s security services—would escape the attention of chip companies’ executives. 

Eight years ago Intel started fashioning  a “strategic cooperation” agreement with Huawei, the giant state-owned telecom company that most experts say is a virtual arm of Chinese intelligence. In October, 2012 they signed a Memorandum of Understanding for the deal.

Now, however, the Intel-Huawei honeymoon may be souring. Huawei has been sanctioned by the Trump administration, not just for its connections to …