Research ties China's leading open-weight AI models to Nvidia chips barred from export
New research claims China’s leading open-weight AI models were trained on Nvidia chips the United States restricts from shipping to China. Will DePue, a former OpenAI researcher who leads the nonprofit Unemployment Labs, examined published weights from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, and Ant Group and reported fingerprints of Blackwell GPUs—chips banned for export to China or Chinese-owned firms—on closely watched releases including Moonshot’s Kimi K3 and DeepSeek’s V4. White House technology adviser Michael Kratsios had earlier said Moonshot used export-banned Nvidia chips, citing U.S. intelligence. Epoch AI estimates about two million advanced chips entered China in 2024 and 2025 through schemes meant to hide their destination.
That does not prove the models were trained only on Nvidia hardware or that export laws were broken: the chips could sit in offshore data centers, a route that has also fueled demand in Malaysia, where Epoch estimates 275,000 Nvidia AI accelerators were imported in 2024 and 2025. Critics such as Sam Bresnick of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology argue controls that stop use in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau while allowing Malaysian compute miss the bans’ purpose.
Nvidia’s exposure is political as well as commercial. CEO Jensen Huang left the company this week after admitting an affair with Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, a firm implicated in smuggling Nvidia chips into China and alleged to have ties to Chinese intelligence; Megaspeed’s Speedmatrix unit has faced U.S. and Singaporean investigations, and Bloomberg reported a company linked to Alice Huang in smuggling banned chips to a Shanghai data center. Nvidia’s potential liability for export-control violations likely factored into the split. Washington still permits H200 shipments on a circuitous route so the U.S. can claim a 25% tariff; some 600,000 H200s are reportedly stockpiled in Hong Kong. Short-seller Culper argued in May that Chinese demand, via remote centers or smuggling, is a core Nvidia risk, while also warning Beijing’s push for domestic chips could erase that demand.
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