SINGAPORE—Chinese officials are building a list of U.S. technology companies that can be targeted with antitrust probes and other tools, hoping to influence the tech executives who are heavily represented in President Trump’s orbit.
People familiar with Beijing’s strategy said the goal was to collect as many cards as possible to play in expected negotiations with the Trump administration over U.S.-China issues, including the tariffs that Trump has imposed on Chinese goods.
Beijing has already said it is investigating Nvidia and Google over alleged antitrust issues. Other American companies in its sights include Apple, Silicon Valley tech company Broadcom and semiconductor-design software vendor Synopsys, said people familiar with the matter. Synopsys has a $35 billion acquisition awaiting approval by Beijing.
China needs all the leverage it can get to hit back at the U.S., and antitrust is one of the most useful, said Tom Nunlist, a Shanghai-based tech policy specialist at consulting firm Trivium China.
“China is on a chip-gathering exercise,” said Nunlist, likening the countries to poker players. “They want to come to the table to negotiate and need something to play with.”
The strategy carries risks. American companies recently have been less willing than in Trump’s first term to go to bat for China, and the threats could backfire by discouraging companies from investing in the country when that is what Beijing wants.
Beijing has added to its regulatory tools in recent years, drawing lessons from America’s approach. In 2020, it created an “unreliable entity list” of companies—mimicking a U.S. entity list that blocks Chinese technology leader Huawei and others from doing business with Americans. In 2022, China amended its antitrust law to tighten rules on anticompetitive mergers.
Chinese officials hope to get the attention of people in Trump’s world including the executives who sat by his side on inauguration day such as Google’s Sundar Pichai and Apple’s Tim Cook, said people close to Beijing’s policymakers.
Moments after an additional 10% U.S. tariff on Chinese goods took effect Tuesday, China said it had opened an antitrust probe against Google.
China was irked in 2019 when Google, complying with U.S. rules, restricted Huawei from using the Android operating system for mobile devices. Huawei later lost access to Google’s app and other proprietary software and was forced to develop its own operating system.
Another tit-for-tat move came in December, when the Biden administration ratcheted up controls on China’s access to high-end semiconductors. A week later, China said it had started investigating Nvidia, which makes the most powerful chips for developing artificial intelligence, over a merger in 2019.
The probe centers on whether Nvidia discriminated against Chinese companies when it stopped selling them certain products, people familiar with the matter said. U.S. export controls since 2022 restricted Nvidia from selling its most advanced AI chips to China. Nvidia declined to comment.
Apple has been at odds with Chinese tech companies over its practice of taking a cut when app developers charge for in-app services such as buying tokens to play a game. Tencent, a Chinese videogame leader, and ByteDance, the parent of TikTok, have brought to Apple their concerns that some App Store policies are unfair.
Similar complaints have been scrutinized by regulators around the world. Apple has said its policies ensure the quality and safety of apps.
While Chinese regulators initially watched the commercial dispute from the sidelines, in recent weeks they have taken a closer look, people familiar with the matter said. Some officials view Apple’s charges in China as unreasonably high and believe Apple’s rules governing app payments hinder competition, the people said. As a result, Beijing sees the company as another card it can play in talks with the U.S.
Mergers between multinationals typically require approval from antitrust regulators around the globe, and they can fall apart if they fail to gain even one major-country approval.
In 2018, amid U.S.-China trade conflicts in the first Trump administration, Qualcomm terminated its proposed purchase of Dutch chip maker NXP Semiconductors after failing to obtain clearance from China.
U.S. chip maker Broadcom’s takeover of VMware, valued at $61 billion when it was unveiled in May 2022, was in peril until a meeting between Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in November 2023. The two leaders agreed to dial down tensions. Shortly afterward, China greenlighted the deal at the 11th hour with conditions, requiring Broadcom to ensure supply to Chinese customers.
China has increasingly attached such conditions to deals, especially semiconductor mergers, meaning the companies remain vulnerable to regulatory action even after the deals close, lawyers say. U.S. chip companies Intel and AMD have had deals approved with conditions in China in the past few years.
“By enforcing strict compliance conditions, Beijing can exert pressure on firms and impose penalties for noncompliance,” said Angela Zhang, a professor at the University of Southern California specializing in Chinese antitrust law.
Still, she said, “Beijing has to be cautious when taking action against U.S. firms, especially those it relies on for critical components like Nvidia.”
One deal in limbo is chip-design software vendor Synopsys’s proposed $35 billion acquisition of engineering software company Ansys. Beijing was unhappy when Synopsys, complying with U.S. export controls, cut off China’s access to some software for designing advanced chips. In December the Chinese antitrust regulator told Synopsys it would suspend its review, citing insufficient materials, people close to the deal said.
A Synopsys spokesperson said the company was confident the review would be resolved favorably and expected the transaction to close in the first half of 2025.
National security is another tool China can use to curtail U.S. companies. In 2023, China banned major Chinese firms from buying from U.S. chip maker Micron Technology, after it said a cybersecurity probe identified national-security risks. The Commerce Department said at the time that the restrictions had no basis in fact.
Write to Liza Lin at liza.lin@wsj.com and Raffaele Huang at raffaele.huang@wsj.com