The tech cold war between the United States and China is continuing to escalate. Just days after the Trump administration blacklisted China’s largest tech firm, Huawei, it’s reportedly weighing a ban against additional Chinese companies as part of its broader standoff with Beijing, cutting off their access to American technology. The move is likely to inflame tensions, and could accelerate the division between companies that rely on American tech, and those that use Chinese, potentially setting Beijing on a path to technological independence. “Even the briefest of bans will be proof to them that China can no longer rely on outsiders,” Bloomberg’s Tim Culpan wrote Sunday. “This can only accelerate the process of creating a digital iron curtain that separates the world into two distinct, mutually exclusive technological spheres.”

The standoff has been brewing for months as Donald Trump battles Chinese President Xi Jinping over a relationship the president says has “taken so advantage” of the U.S., but it boiled over last week when the administration blacklisted Huawei, accusing the Chinese tech giant of being “involved in activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States”—namely, helping the Chinese government engage in foreign espionage. Major western tech companies including Google and chipmakers like Intel and Qualcomm have cut off supply to Huawei. Still, China has stood firm. On Monday, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei said the administration “underestimates” China’s strength and welcomed the fight as step toward global tech domination. “We have sacrificed ourselves and our families for our ideal: to stand on top of the world,” Ren told Chinese media. “To reach this ideal, sooner or later there will be conflict with the U.S.”

That conflict has already hurt Huawei, and could bring some pain to American companies that do business with the world’s second-largest economy, as the Associated Press noted Tuesday. But in the longer term, it could spur China to greater independence from the U.S., raising the specter of the bifurcated internet that Eric Schmidt—the former C.E.O. of Google’s parent company, Alphabet—and others have predicted. “I think the most likely scenario now is not a splintering,” Schmidt said last year, “but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America.” China has already set 2025 as its target for technological independence. If it no longer sees the U.S. as a reliable partner, it is ever more likely to begin a push to manufacture all its products domestically. Such bifurcation could change the tech sphere as we know it, creating not only different digital universes for different populations (a censored Web in authoritarian China, and a free Web everywhere else), but different megalithic hardware companies, depending on the region.

Tensions are already high between the countries over the Huawei dispute, but they’re likely to grow as the U.S. considers adding to the blacklist. Hikvision, the world’s largest manufacturer of video surveillance equipment and one of the companies that could fall under the axe, has faced bipartisan scrutiny in the U.S. over its role in the Chinese government’s use of artificial intelligence to track and control its minority Muslim population. But the move has drawn condemnation from Beijing, which is accusing the administration of “arbitrarily” hitting at Chinese industry to gain an upper hand in its trade war. “China opposes the United States’s practice of abusing state power and arbitrarily discrediting and suppressing foreign enterprises, including Chinese enterprises, Lu Kang, a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, said in a briefing Wednesday.