The Spanish government has intervened at the eleventh hour to cancel a contract that would have boosted the use of Chinese tech giant Huawei’s fibre optic equipment across the country, citing “strategic autonomy”.
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The €10 million (US$11.69 million) contract had been greenlit by the relevant public utility on Monday, only for Spain’s digital transformation ministry to move at the last minute to nix it, El País reported, for “reasons of digital strategy and strategic autonomy”.
Madrid had been under fire from Brussels and Washington for doubling down on its usage of Huawei equipment despite the EU asking its member states to remove the company from their 5G networks, citing security concerns.
Huawei did not immediately respond to a request for comment but has strenuously denied links to the Chinese state in the past. It also pushes back against accusations that its equipment carries a security risk.
The contract would have seen the “installation of next-generation Huawei equipment in a public fibre optic mega-network of more than 16,000 kilometres that covers the entire Spanish territory”, the newspaper reported.
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The expansion would have, according to the tendering documents, helped bolster the network under pressure from “the progressive growth of traffic … mainly due to supercomputing projects”.
