On Friday, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. government would take a 10% stake in the hardware manufacturer Intel, involving the government in the private tech industry in a new, unprecedented way.

Now Forbes has learned that Intel has little known partnerships with multiple Chinese surveillance firms, including Uniview — which landed on a U.S. sanctions list last year “because it enables human rights violations, including high-technology surveillance targeted at the general population, Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups.” (Uniview has asked the U.S. to reconsider the sanctions.)

Intel’s Chinese-language site also includes documents referencing partnerships with Hikvision, a major surveillance camera manufacturer that has been hit with a barrage of sanctions in the last five years, and Cloudwalk, a facial recognition company which was sanctioned in 2021. Both companies have been accused by the U.S. government of allegedly enabling human rights abuses through surveillance of Uyghurs.

In promotional materials (archived here) for its “Deep Eye” smart camera on Intel’s website, Hikvision enthusiastically describes its “in-depth cooperation with Intel” and lists multiple ways Intel’s tech is integrated into its surveillance technology. "This kind of collaboration and cyclical innovation has enabled Hikvision to achieve gratifying results in promoting intelligent video surveillance," it says. (These quotes are machine-translated.)

Intel also highlights the use of its Atom processor in Cloudwalk’s Juyan smart cameras, which it says are focused on retail (

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