The story mentioned intel and Qualcomm but quite possibly Broadcom was/is lobbying hard behind the scenes. They have a long history with both ZTE and Huawei and

The story mentioned intel and Qualcomm but quite possibly Broadcom was/is lobbying hard behind the scenes. They have a long history with both ZTE and Huawei and a lot to lose from the blacklisting. Luckily they weren’t allowed to purchase Qualcomm when they tried