Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) corporations DeepSeek are using Nvidia's state-of-the-art AI chips that are banned for export to China, Reuters reported on the 23rd, citing a U.S. Trump administration government official.
DeepSeek plans to release its next-generation AI model "V4" next week, and the model was trained on Nvidia's latest AI chip "Blackwell," according to a senior Trump administration official who spoke to Reuters. The U.S. government expects DeepSeek to remove technical indicators and other traces that it used U.S. AI chips before the announcement.
However, the U.S. government did not explain in detail how it obtained this information.
The official said the Blackwell chips were most likely installed at a data center located in China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The official also estimated that DeepSeek used a distillation technique to extract outputs from U.S. AI models such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI by leveraging Blackwell chips.
The distillation technique is a method of creating a model with similar performance by using answers produced by other AI models as training data. OpenAI and Anthropic argue that using large-scale distillation against competitors' models is effectively stealing the functions of AI models.
Analyses say the R1 model, which caused the so-called "DeepSeek shock" early last year, was also developed by distilling U.S. AI models including ChatGPT.
Nvidia's Blackwell chips are currently banned from export to China. President Donald Trump decided in Dec. last year to partially allow exports of Nvidia's advanced chips to China, but that applies to the H200 chip using the "Hopper" architecture, which is one generation behind "Blackwell." Shipments of the H200 chip are also being delayed due to disagreements over restrictions in the export approval process.
Reuters predicted that news of DeepSeek's smuggling of Blackwell chips would deepen divisions among Washington policymakers over AI chip exports to China. Nvidia chips are said to be installed in data centers in third countries, then disassembled right after inspection and smuggled into China after false declarations.