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Finbarr Bermingham

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”.
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 Pais 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 Beijing 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.
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”.

The Ministry of Defence in Spain – a Nato member – was among the institutions who would have been serviced by the network. Military academies linked to the ministry had recently been added to the network, named RedIRISNOVA.
This project is separate to a €12.3 million contract awarded to Huawei in July by Spain’s Ministry of the Interior to manage and install authorised wiretaps used by law enforcement and intelligence services.
That deal had been met with a furious response from Washington, where lawmakers urged intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard to stop sharing intelligence with Madrid until it stopped using Huawei for government contracts.
“Since the first Trump administration, the United States has waged a whole of government effort to remove the threat Huawei equipment poses to American networks, infrastructure, and privacy,” wrote Tom Cotton and Rick Crawford, the chairs of the Senate and House select committees on intelligence, respectively.
“Until Spain follows suit, the US Government should ensure that any information shared with the Spanish government is redacted of details that should not be shared with the CCP [Chinese Communist Party].”
In Brussels, Jorge Buxade, a member of the European Parliament for the far-right Spanish VOX party, wrote to the European Commission, urging it to “assess the security risks” of the wiretap contract.
“Despite warnings from the Commission and other international allies, Spain’s socialist Government has decided to ignore the security implications this could have for judicial and police cooperation both nationally and at European level,” Buxade wrote, asking the commission whether the deal complied with its recommendations on 5G security and the EU’s cybersecurity laws.
Since 2020, when it launched its “5G toolkit”, the commission has been recommending that the 27 member states “apply relevant restrictions for suppliers considered as high risk”.
Frustrated at the lack of urgency among capitals, the commission went a step further in 2023, by directly requesting that they stop using Huawei and ZTE – both Chinese companies – saying that they carry “materially higher risks than other suppliers”.
Since then, Huawei has become embroiled in a bribery scandal in the European Parliament, but still retains a strong presence in the European telecoms network.
As of August 2024, only 11 of 27 EU members had used legal powers to remove “high-risk” vendors from their network infrastructure, Euronews reported.
Germany, the EU’s largest economy, has started the process of removing Huawei from its infrastructure, with deadlines staggered to 2029.


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Last-minute decision comes as Madrid faces pressure from Brussels and Washington over China security concerns


Last-minute decision comes as Madrid faces pressure from Brussels and Washington over China security concerns.


Spain cancels fibre-optic service contract involving use of Huawei equipment

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Last-minute decision comes as Madrid faces pressure from Brussels and Washington over China security concerns

Last-minute decision comes as Madrid faces pressure from Brussels and Washington over China security concerns