US President Biden signs order to ban certain tech investments in China – Reuters

Late Wednesday, US President Joe Biden signed the much-awaited bill that allows the US Treasury Department to prohibit or restrict certain US investments in Chinese entities, per Reuters.

The three key technology sectors mentioned in the executive order are semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies, and certain Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems.

The news also cites US President Biden as declaring a national emergency to deal with countries like China "in sensitive technologies and products critical to the military, intelligence, surveillance, or cyber-enabled capabilities."

It’s worth noting that the bill was edited to soften the restrictions for China technology companies on a revenue generation basis. Bloomberg previously came out with the news suggesting the hardships for only those Chinese companies that get more than 50% of revenue from the sectors including quantum computing and artificial intelligence (AI) to be included in the list.

Market reaction

Trading sentiment remains mostly unchanged on the news as most market players were aware of the outcome. Also restricting the reaction to the news could be the trader’s wait for the US inflation data.

Also read: AUD/USD stays depressed below 0.6550 ahead of Australia/US inflation clues