Export-Banned Nvidia Chips Found Behind China's Top AI Models
Research claims Chinese labs trained leading open-weight AI models on Nvidia Blackwell GPUs banned from export to China.
A new research effort claims that Chinese companies' leading open-weight AI models were trained on Nvidia chips that U.S. export controls ban from shipping to China, highlighting how widely restricted hardware has reached Chinese labs.
Will DePue, a former OpenAI researcher who leads the nonprofit Unemployment Labs, analyzed the weights of models released openly by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group. He found evidence that models including Moonshot's Kimi K3 releases and DeepSeek's V4 bear fingerprints from training on Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs, according to TechCrunch.
White House technology adviser Michael Kratsios said earlier this year that Moonshot had used export-banned Nvidia chips, citing U.S. intelligence sources. Epoch AI, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that about two million advanced chips entered China in 2024 and 2025 through schemes designed to hide their final destination, and that 275,000 Nvidia AI accelerators were imported to Malaysia in the same period.
The chips may have been used in offshore data centers rather than inside China, which has become a popular way for Chinese firms to access compute. Export controls are meant to prevent Chinese AI labs from training on the most powerful chips, but China hawks have long argued controls should cover who uses chips, not just where they are installed.
Megaspeed, the company led by Alice Huang, has been at the center of that trade for several years through its subsidiary Speedmatrix and has been investigated by both the U.S. and Singaporean governments. Bloomberg reported Friday that a company linked to Alice Huang was involved in smuggling banned Nvidia chips to a data center in Shanghai.
Nvidia and Jensen Huang have both vouched for Megaspeed's data centers, saying Nvidia officials visited them to confirm they were legitimate. Nvidia and Huang have not responded to the allegations beyond that. Nvidia shares were down 2.0% in delayed trading.