Taxpayers Now Co-Own Intel's Xinjiang Partner

Introduction

In August 2025, the US government took a 9.9% stake in Intel, about $8.9 billion in stock, part of an $11.1 billion total commitment that converted the unspent CHIPS Act grants into equity. The same Intel had been partnering with Hisign, a Chinese fingerprint company, through 2024, and Hisign sold its fingerprint readers to Xinjiang police. On May 4, 2026, the AP journalists who documented all of it won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

So federal tax dollars are now sitting on the cap table of a company whose Chinese partner was selling biometric surveillance to the police running the Xinjiang camps.

What the AP Pulled Out of China

"Made in America, Watched Worldwide" ran for three years. AP reporters (led by Dake Kang and Garance Burke) worked through tens of thousands of internal corporate documents, classified Chinese government blueprints obtained from a whistleblower, a leaked accounting ledger, and more than 100 interviews with engineers, executives, officials, and former Xinjiang police. The Pulitzer board's citation describes "state-of-the-art tools of mass surveillance, created in Silicon Valley, advanced in China and spreading worldwide before returning to America for secret new uses by the U.S. Border Patrol."

What most headline coverage missed: American tech firms marketed their products directly to Communist Party authorities using CCP catchphrases like "stability maintenance," "key persons," "abnormal gatherings," "Internet Police," "Sharp Eyes," and "Golden Shield." IBM's 2009 sales pitch to Huadi, the state-owned subsidiary of China's biggest missile contractor, said "Prevent problems before they happen." A classified Huadi blueprint AP obtained read: "Consolidate Communist Party rule."

Intel partnered with Hisign through 2024, and Hisign sold fingerprint readers to Xinjiang police. Dell promoted "military-grade" AI laptops with "all-race recognition" on its official Chinese WeChat channel in 2019. Thermo Fisher's website, until AP contacted the company in August 2025, was still marketing DNA kits to Chinese police that the company described as designed for "ethnic minorities like Uyghurs and Tibetans." Dell and VMWare sold cloud software and storage to police in Tibet and Xinjiang as late as 2022.

The Government's Part

The October 29, 2025 AP companion investigation is the document that should be on every congressional desk this week. Across five administrations (Bush, Obama, the first Trump term, Biden, and the second Trump term), the US Commerce Department actively connected American vendors to Chinese security agencies through its export-promotion arm, the US Commercial Service, including via the Gold Key Matching service.

In 2007, the Commerce Department ran a webinar promoting surveillance technology sales to China's public sector. The seat fee was $35, and AP found the marketing materials offered "market entry-strategies and long-term market penetration plans." In 2010, US Ambassador Jon Huntsman led a business promotion mission to Xinjiang, one year after the deadly 2009 unrest and the mass arrests that followed. A 2015 State Department draft plan for "smart city" cooperation with China named IBM as a private-sector player on joint research into crime and "urban security."

Inside the Obama administration, the path to the export-control office ran through industry. Eric Hirschhorn, the appointee placed in charge of administering US export controls, had previously represented a trade group lobbying for tech companies that wanted to sell abroad; AP reports he wrote at one point that Beijing's surveillance was "nothing compared to" London's cameras. Kevin Wolf, the Obama-era assistant secretary for export administration, told AP he started drafting a surveillance-gear rule in early 2016, but colleagues told him it was too complicated and the rule was dropped.

Bills to close the post-Tiananmen technology loophole (which excluded newer tools like cameras, facial recognition, and surveillance drives) were introduced in 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2013, and all five failed. Since September 2024, lawmakers have tried four more times to close a different loophole that lets Chinese firms rent banned chips through AWS and Azure, and all four attempts collapsed after more than 100 tech-industry lobbyists weighed in.

What the Numbers Buy

The Xinjiang system AP describes is a working product. The Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) was built by Landasoft, a former IBM agent, by copying IBM's i2 police-analytics software. According to AP's reporting, IJOP flagged 24,412 people as "suspicious" in one week from June 19 to 26, 2017. Of those, 706 were detained as criminals and 15,683 were sent to "education and training." Approximately one million Uyghurs and other minorities were eventually swept into camps and prisons. AP estimates that at least 55,000 to 110,000 people in Xinjiang and Tibet have been put under residential surveillance over the past decade. AP also found that the cost to police of running 16 years of surveillance on the Yang family, one rural farming household, was approximately $37,000.

Chinese cities now have more cameras than the rest of the world combined: one for every two people.

A leaked accounting ledger AP obtained shows IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft together sold tens of millions of dollars of products to upgrade China's Golden Shield systems, products specifically pitched as upgrades to Beijing's police infrastructure. IBM, Oracle, HP, and Esri sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of geographic software to build China's Police Geographic Information System, which lets police detect when blacklisted Uyghurs, Tibetans, or dissidents leave their provinces.

The companies have a different version. Trade lawyer Raj Bhala told AP these are "the kind of gray area we put in exams." Companies say their products are general-purpose and sold identically worldwide. Microsoft said it found "no evidence of knowingly selling technology to the military or police" for Golden Shield. IBM said any possible misuse "was not contemplated by IBM decades ago, and in no way reflects on IBM today." Several firms did pull back: IBM banned sales to Tibet and Xinjiang police starting in 2015 and suspended Huadi business in 2019; Thermo Fisher halted Xinjiang sales in 2021 and Tibet sales in 2024; Nvidia and Intel ended partnerships with China's top two surveillance companies in 2019.

The pullbacks ran in press releases while products kept moving through third-party resellers and maintenance contracts kept billing. Thermo Fisher equipment worth at least $521,165 reached eight Xinjiang security agencies between May 2019 and June 2021 through resellers after the announced suspension.

Who Benefits

Start with the tech companies. The leaked ledger AP obtained shows tens of millions of dollars in Chinese police purchases of IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft systems. Intel collected $8.5 billion in Biden-era CHIPS Act direct funding plus an additional ~$8.9 billion equity conversion under Trump in August 2025, for a total US government commitment of approximately $11.1 billion. IBM holds a $576 million Pentagon contract from the Defense Microelectronics Activity awarded in March 2024 while continuing maintenance contracts on Chinese police systems per AP's reporting. Dell and IBM were among the winners of a $2.5 billion Pentagon IT contract awarded in August 2023.

They also spent on lobbying. AP reports US tech and telecom companies and trade associations spent "hundreds of millions of dollars" over two decades on China-trade bills. Nvidia's federal lobbying jumped to $4.95 million in 2025, up from $640,000 the year before, per OpenSecrets. The August 2025 Trump-Nvidia deal lifted AI chip export controls for Nvidia's H20 and AMD's MI308 in exchange for a 15% revenue share flowing to the US government. Jensen Huang personally negotiated; Trump asked for 20%, Huang got it to 15%. Twenty former US officials wrote a letter in July 2025 warning the chips would "fall into the hands of Chinese military and intelligence services," and the deal closed the following month.

For the US government, the payoff is political cover plus a direct financial cut. Trump revoked Biden's Executive Order 14110, the AI safety order that required civil rights safeguards on law-enforcement AI, within hours of taking office on January 20, 2025; his replacement order directed agencies to rescind Biden-era AI policies inconsistent with deregulation. By August 2025, he had lifted the Nvidia chip controls and converted Intel CHIPS grants into equity. The 15% Nvidia revenue share and the 9.9% Intel stake make federal taxpayers financial partners in whatever the AI surveillance supply chain does next.

For the Chinese government, the payoff is a working surveillance apparatus it could not have built alone. Researcher Valentin Weber of the German Council on Foreign Relations told AP that "China's capability was close to zero" before the imports started. Now Beijing exports the model to Iran and Russia.

The Same Tools, Now at the Border

The Pulitzer citation specifies that the surveillance architecture is "spreading worldwide before returning to America for secret new uses by the U.S. Border Patrol." The AP series included a separate story showing Border Patrol secretly used a license plate algorithm program and dropped cases when disclosure threatened to surface the practice.

The same government that ran the surveillance sales webinars and placed an industry lobbyist in charge of export controls now holds equity in two of the named vendors. By August 2025, EO 14110 was gone, the chip controls were gone, and the US Treasury held equity in Intel. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) told AP, "I think we've been naive or complicit in the extreme. We've been selling and conveying to a malevolent power the ability to destroy us." Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) gave the shorter version: "What do all those companies have in common? A big wallet."

Eight Months Later

If your federal tax dollars are sitting in that Intel stake, they're alongside a corporate balance sheet that listed a Chinese fingerprint surveillance partner as recently as last year. If they're collecting 15% of Nvidia's H20 revenue, they're collecting that share regardless of where the chips end up. The Pulitzer-winning record going back to IBM's 2009 Huadi pitch was the kind of evidence that usually precedes a congressional hearing. Instead the federal government took an equity position in two of the named vendors.

The open question is whether the Pulitzer changes anything specific. The AP investigation has been sitting in front of Congress since September 9, 2025. Eight months later, no bill has closed the cloud-services loophole and the Intel stake remains on the federal balance sheet. The next budget reconciliation cycle opens later this year. Whether the same lobbying coalition that killed nine reform bills before kills the next one will tell you whether $20.7 billion in 2024 chipmaking-equipment exports to China was a low point or a floor.