Export-banned Nvidia chips are behind China’s most powerful AI models—uh oh, Jensen!

NEW: China's most advanced AI models were trained on export-banned Nvidia Blackwell chips, new research shows, raising fresh questions over US chip controls amid the widening Jensen Huang scandal. $NVDA

China's best AI models were trained on chips America banned them from having.

New research analysed the open models from DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax and Ant Group, and found the weights carry fingerprints of Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs. Those are the top-end chips Washington explicitly blocked from China. Will DePue, a former OpenAI researcher, ran the analysis, and it lines up with what the White House said about Moonshot earlier this year.

The scale is the part that gets me. Epoch AI estimates around two million advanced chips slipped into China in 2024 and 2025 through routes built to hide where they ended up. Some may sit in offshore data centres in Malaysia, which is legal-ish on paper, but it's exactly what the export rules were supposed to stop.

And this lands days after Jensen Huang resigned over his affair with an executive at a company accused of smuggling those very chips. The controls didn't slow China down. They just added a shipping detour.

This is Liu Yang, reporting for HIT.