According to the Wall Street Journal, General Motors is “closing in on the sale of its HUMMER brand with an undisclosed investor.”

Potential investors have included Chinese companies as well as other international investors, though GM could not release any more details due to pending negotiations.

Sources familiar with the matter are suggesting the deal has the potential to save 3,000 jobs in the United States.

Reportedly, the buyer has committed to making aggressive investments in the future of HUMMER, and acquiring the HUMMER H3 and H3T plant in Shreveport, LA could end up being a condition of a final deal.

General Motors typically doesn’t release major announcements on Sundays, though with bankruptcy looming within 24 hours anything can happen. We’ll bring you more info as it becomes available.

As expected, General Motors has announced it's entered "into a memorandum of understanding with a buyer for Hummer," but under the terms of the transaction, the purchaser hasn't been disclosed.

GM's brief release (posted after the break) scratches the surface of the plan, saying only that the deal is expected to close by the third quarter of this year, that the new investor is committed to funding future Hummer products – possibly including the H4 and a two-door H3T – and that 3,000 U.S. manufacturing, engineering and dealer jobs will be saved.

Those last two points caught the eye of PickupTrucks.com, which tapped one of its sources within GM to ask how manufacturing and dealer jobs have escaped the axe. On the manufacturing front, the H3 production facility in South Africa (which makes right-hand drive models for markets outside the States) will be shuttered and assembly will move back to the U.S. Additionally, the memorandum of understanding states that no Hummer dealers in the U.S. will closed.

According to the NYT, the entity GM's reached a preliminary agreement with to buy the Hummer brand is a random machinery company in western China with ambitions to become an automaker. We're hoping next on the ambition list isn't "take over USA with their own pseudo-military utility vehicles."

The NYT source is a person familiar with the Chinese government approval process who claims the Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company Ltd., based in Chengdu, concluded the agreement with G.M.

Sichuan Tengzhong is a privately owned company, but Tuesday's deal required preliminary vetting by Beijing officials, who retain the right to veto any attempt at an overseas acquisition by a Chinese company and who give special attention to deals over $100 million.

Well, at least we now know it's probably a deal worth over $100 million.

We also expected it was probably a foreign company looking to buy Hummer, considering the news our friends at PickupTrucks.com reported earlier today that the deal prohibits the export of military technology of any sort with the buyer. So don't worry, your secret non-military but vital for Big Gulp cupholder technology won't compromise our national security.

But our biggest question is this — remember when we were on The Colbert Report last year? Remember the Hummer fans they visited? We wonder how many of them will be interested in buying a Hummer from a Chinese-owned company or will be slapping a "Better Red Than Dead" bumper sticker to the back of their current HumVee look-a-like? Probably not so many. [via NYT]