A senior official in the White House was cited in a Reuters exclusive as saying that China’s DeepSeek has trained AI models on Nvidia’s Blackwell chips—the company’s most advanced. If this were true, Reuters said, it would constitute a violation of current US export controls. It gave no details about how the chips were allegedly obtained. The official said DeepSeek’s Blackwells are likely part of a cluster at a data center in China’s Inner Mongolia.
The news follows an approval last month by Washington of Nvidia’s second-most powerful chip, the H200 to China—a move that caused contention among policymakers amid calls to limit Chinese access to US tech, citing concerns over both the threat to US dominance in AI and the potential for military applications. It’s unclear what this latest development means for the export of the H200 chips to China, and to DeepSeek in particular.
The news obviously raises the question of to what extent Nvidia was aware of the sale of Blackwell chips to DeepSeek through whatever channels and whether there may be any consequences for them. All this comes as a backdrop for a planned Trump visit to Beijing in April.