China’s DeepSeek trained its AI model on Nvidia’s best chip despite US ban
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China hawks in the US fear advanced chips can supercharge China's military and threaten US dominance in AI.
PHOTO: REUTERS
WASHINGTON – Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek’s latest AI model, set to be released as soon as next week, was trained on Nvidia’s most advanced AI chip, the Blackwell, a senior Trump administration official said on Feb 23, in what could represent a violation of US export controls.
The US believes DeepSeek will remove the technical indicators that might reveal its use of American AI chips, the official said, adding that the Blackwells are likely clustered at its data centre in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China.
The official declined to say how the US government received the information or how DeepSeek obtained the chips, but emphasised that US policy is: “We’re not shipping Blackwells to China.”
Nvidia declined to comment, while the Commerce Department and DeepSeek did not respond to requests for comment.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington said Beijing opposes “drawing ideological lines, overstretching the concept of national security, expansive use of export controls and politicising economic, trade and technological issues”.
The news, not previously reported, could further divide Washington policymakers as they struggle to determine where to draw the line on Chinese access to the crown jewels of American AI semiconductor chips.
China hawks fear the chips could easily be diverted from commercial uses to supercharge China’s military and threaten US dominance in AI.
But White House AI Czar David Sacks and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang argue that shipping advanced AI chips to China discourages Chinese competitors like Huawei from redoubling efforts to catch up with Nvidia’s and AMD’s technologies.
US export controls, overseen by the Commerce Department, currently bar Blackwell shipments to China.
In August, US President Donald Trump opened the door to Nvidia selling a scaled-down version of the Blackwell in China. But he later reversed course, suggesting the company’s most advanced chips should be reserved for US companies and kept out of China.
Mr Trump’s decision in December to allow Chinese companies to buy Nvidia’s second-most advanced chips, known as the H200, drew sharp criticism from China hawks, but shipments of the chips remain stalled over guardrails built into the approvals.
“Chinese AI companies’ reliance on smuggled Blackwells underscores their massive shortfall of domestically produced AI chips and why approvals of H200 chips would represent a lifeline,” said Dr Saif Khan, who served as director of technology and national security at the White House’s National Security Council under former president Joe Biden.
The official declined to comment on how the latest news would impact the Trump administration’s decision on whether to allow DeepSeek to buy H200s.
The model they helped train likely relied on the “distillation” of models made by leading-edge US AI companies, including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI, echoing allegations made by OpenAI and Anthropic, the official added.
Distillation is a technique in which an older, more established and powerful AI model evaluates the quality of answers coming from a newer model, effectively transferring the older model’s learnings.
Hangzhou-based DeepSeek shook markets early in 2025 with a set of AI models that rivalled some of the best offerings from the US, fuelling concerns in Washington that China could catch up in the AI race despite restrictions. REUTERS
