Banned Nvidia Blackwell chips trained China's top AI models
Original: Export-banned Nvidia chips are behind China’s most powerful AI models — uh-oh, Jensen!
Why This Matters
Shows U.S. chip export controls are failing to limit Chinese frontier AI development.
Research by nonprofit Unemployment Labs found fingerprints of export-banned Nvidia Blackwell GPUs in leading Chinese AI models from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, and Ant Group, as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang departed following a scandal involving chip smuggling.
Will DePue, former OpenAI researcher and head of Unemployment Labs, analyzed the weights of open-weight models from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, and Ant Group. Model weights retain signatures of the hardware used in training — and DePue found compelling evidence that top models, including Moonshot's Kimi K3 and DeepSeek's V4 series, were trained on Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, which are explicitly banned from export to China. The findings land as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has left the company following revelations of an affair with Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed — a firm accused of smuggling Nvidia chips into China — who has also been alleged to be a Chinese intelligence agent. Nvidia's potential exposure to export control violations is believed to have factored into the board's decision. White House technology adviser Michael Kratsios had already cited U.S. intelligence claiming Moonshot used banned chips. Epoch AI estimates roughly two million advanced chips reached China via destination-concealment schemes in 2024–2025, with 275,000 Nvidia AI accelerators flowing into Malaysia alone — a country that has become a popular offshore compute hub for Chinese labs. The research doesn't prove direct export law violations, since offshore data centers in Malaysia technically allow legal access, but critics argue that sidesteps the entire intent of the controls.