US firm accuses Huawei of enlisting professor to obtain its tech as tensions mount between China and US
- Huawei’s gear has been largely shut out of the United States since 2012 over security concerns the technology could be used for espionage
A US start-up company is accusing Chinese telecommunications gear provider Huawei of enlisting a Chinese university professor working on a research project to improperly access the start-up’s technology, according to court documents filed last week.
California-based CNEX is developing technology to enhance the performance of solid-state drives in data centers and has been in a dispute with Huawei Technologies since 2017. In a new set of counterclaims filed in federal court in Texas last week, CNEX alleged that Bo Mao, a professor at Xiamen University, asked for one of the company’s circuit boards as part of a research project.
The company alleges that it required Mao to sign a “strict non-disclosure obligation” about the circuit board. But CNEX alleged that, unbeknown to it, the university was working with Huawei and alleged that after it sent the circuit board to the professor, technical details about its products ended up in Huawei’s hands.
“Huawei took CNEX’s proprietary and trade secret information and shared it with the personnel developing Huawei’s (solid-state drive) controllers in violation of representations made to CNEX and restrictions placed on the distribution of CNEX’s technical information,” the start-up said in the filing.
Neither Huawei nor Mao returned a request from Reuters for comment.