alt Hacker NewsDeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
(Original is https://www.theinformation.com/articles/deepseek-using-banne... but hardwalled)
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I recommend everyone to watch GamersNexus' documentary on the NVIDIA AI GPU black market. They explain how companies like DeepSeek can get a hold of chips that are otherwise banned by the US government to export to China
Sanctions just slightly increase the cost of obtaining an item, but don't make it impossible. Electronic components can be bought, oil can be sold, ChatGPT can be used via OpenRouter, sanctioned banks publish their apps under guise into App Store, etc. When there are 200 countries in the world, and money involved, you can get anything.
Sanctioned goods could be used to spread propaganda though, imagine, for example, if installing a NVIDIA GPU driver required answering questions about Tiananmen square incident.
> chips that are banned in the country
> The US bans the sale of these advanced semiconductors to China
Whoa there, Bloomberg; just because the USA bans the sale of something to your country doesn't make it banned in your country.
What's strange in this discussion of chips and export bans is there's been zero discussion of cloud access, I guess networked computers are difficult for America's gerontocrats to understand.
I've rented H100s no problem on American servers and there's no KYC or anything, they let anybody do it.
Good. Unsurprising (well, known), but good. In fact, the world would be a better place if the US would not use their influence to try to keep other countries down.
I don't think anyone is surprised by this.. And I'm almost certain nothing will happen. When manufacturing is next door to you, you'll find a way to get your hands on chips.
The gamernexus point about "open one eye, close one eye" was on point here.
China instructed companies to stop using nvidia chips too...knowing fully well it'll not stop. It achieves their aim though - a strong nudge in the direction of independence.
Much of Chinese top level direction seems to be that way - indicating direction of travel and implied future threats for companies not rowing in said direction
As for the US side of the ban - that's about as sound as the war on drugs. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that's futile
Are these chips that are now banned but we're previously available? If so, doesn't this basically mean nothing? They could just be using chips that they bought when they were allowed to buy them.
It seems pretty difficult to prevent two other countries from trading, especially when it is sort of low-volume (I mean how many boats full of GPUs was this? It isn’t like oil or something, where we can see the infrastructure to consume it via satellite).
Nvidia sells to Bob
Bob sells to China
Bob is a citizen of Ω
Meanwhile, Nvidia is in the awkward position of being legally required to deny everything but economically incentivized to sell as much as Washington allows
A lot of people attack US for banning the chip sale to China, but the reality is that the ban is two way. Not only US bans advanced chips, China also severely limits US chips in the hopes that it can spur the homegrown ones. In fact, the first sentence says it much
Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has relied on Nvidia Corp. chips that are banned in the country
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/nvidia-shares-gain-trump...
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-bans-foreign-ai-ch...
this is revenge for stealing their silkmoths isnt it?
Long term consequences: China outperforms Nvidia, by producing cheaper, faster chips at a large scale, by getting inspired by the IP but using their own production lines.
Through sanctions, the irony is that the west removed the incentive for China to respect IP laws.
Well done.
If they can solve the lithography/ASML issue by getting access to it, then they will be forced to win.
Well if unnamed sources are saying it you know it has to be true.
Oh no, this will lead to better models for less money!
The neo cloud providers, especially those outside the US, with dubious financial backing, that are buying Nvidia chips as if they were an appreciating asset, kind of like being a bitcoin treasury, will be tempted to create some income in ways that break sanctions.
Since the supply chain is all from the same place, they can get so creative and resourceful. You can get 48 and 96GB VRAM 3090 on the grey market which is pretty awesome.
If the companies which are officially banned from owning these products already own them, what does it say about recent initiatives to unban Nvidia sales in China?
If demand of companies like deepseek has already been served, will they buy significant volume of additional products from nvidia once it is "legal" again?
It feels like the initiative of US politics to unblock nvidia China sales might not be very fruitful.
Sanctions are stupid. Its a sign that the country realizes it can't compete fairly anymore.
Hmm. I’ve been out of the loop too long. When did China start getting munitions laws thrown at it? When I cared to know, Boeing could sell to everyone except NK, Syria, Iran, and two others I’m now blanking on. It didn’t matter we were using cryptography that couldn’t ship there because it was illegal for them to have our hardware in the first place.
Since they're going to get them anyways, maybe we should exchange a few for a few pandas with the right to reproduce.
These bans are hard to enforce.
You just need any company outside china that isn't under sanction to buy them and then sell them.
Even further, you can skip the hardware buying entirely and set some shell company to buy compute from the dozens of vendors.
This explains the 1000s of “no core no vram” listings for 5090s If it were due to parts substitution for repairs, would have expected they would be RMA’d rather than salvaged as they’d all be within warranty.
Imagine being a blackmarket GPU smuggler. High danger and high reward to get the most advanced AI silicon to a corporation operating under a repressive regime.
Sounds straight out of sci-fi.
The main reason "Nvidia chips control" doesn’t work is because laws will not prevent criminals from obtaining Nvidia chips nor breaking laws.
What do you want to bet ALL GPU's being manufactured by US sources have NSA requirements that now have built into the chips and firmware interesting "controls". They know what region of the world the chip is in, they have features to "brick them" in case of war, etc. Encrypted communication back to US servers required, or if denied, then GPU will not function, etc.
The phrasing "chips that are banned in the country" seems completely inaccurate. These are chips that the US does not allow to be exported to China. We do not have the power to ban anything in China, that's up to the Chinese government.
Yeah and Israel is using Microsoft technology to commit war crimes. Which is the greater evil? (Forgive the whataboutism, but the handwringing is real)
Send to Singapore then to China, it’s a prett simple loophole.
Oh no! Anyway ...
CIA disinformation campaigns notwithstanding, maybe accept global competition, open-source models, and the fact that whatever advantage OpenAI had was fleeting and mostly squandered at this point. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is especially brutal if you've never made a profit.
This is so obvious, have you seen how many GPUs does Singapore and the countries nearby are buying?
They are still training with less than 1/10 of what the US companies do own, and yet having similar results.
China is killing it.
Related: Deepseek just leapfrogged the competition. Scores gold in 2025's IMO, IOI, and ICPC world finals with an openweights model.
:shocked pikachu face:
Anyone interested in the topic of whether the US can stay ahead of China should ask AI to explain to them the Chinese concepts of 空降美国人 and 美宝.
These concepts are the reason why during some periods flights to the US have had an uncanny number of pregnant women and flights back to China have had an uncanny number of newborn babies.
Now these babies are adults with US citizenship, with some who returned to the US after primary school and became fully fluent native English speakers, and some of whom may be thoroughly culturally loyal to the Chinese communist party. And 100% hireable by top US AI firms and working there as we speak.
It’s staring everyone right in the face, but it’s taboo to talk about, because people conflate concerns about cultural loyalty with racism.
I don’t dislike these people. I welcome them. I also hope they will learn the value of freedom and (representative) democracy. btw Taiwan is a litmus test. (If you are one of the people I’m speaking about, and you think it would be great if the CCP could take over Taiwan, your values are not aligned with freedom and democracy.)
The point is it’s just silly to think we can stay ahead of China. Some of their best researchers are embedded in some of our best teams.
Keeping the technology from our best researchers is not going to work imho. The only avenue I see is to try to culture hack the AI efforts, and maybe most of the researchers, to be well aligned as we go.
Fine. Good. Unless you want the Chinese to be even more motivated to develop an alternative to Nvidia chips.
This is the least surprising thing ever and was highly suspected when DeepSeek released their original model.
We've also seen this with sanctions on Russia but they still somehow bought a bunch of TI chips for missiles [1].
As many here know, the US restricts the export of certain technology to China because reasons. This includes lithography machines from ASML, a Dutch company, who have a monopoly on the latest EUV processes. It's geopolitically interesting that the big buyer of ASML products are TSMC in TAiwan as well as Samsung in South Korea (and possibly Japan?).
I expect this will become a national security issue for China and long-term you will see China try and replicate the best lithographic processes and chips such that the gap will greatly narrow. This will take years and involves a lot of depenedent industries but of anyone China has shown the willingness, ability and resolve to pursue decades-long infrastructure and national security projects.
In the meantime, bans on GPU exports to China will continue to be circumvented (eg [2]) and honestly there's no real reason for those export restrictions anyway.
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-justice-department-ac...
let me just dig out a surprise Pikachu face from my pocket somewhere here ....
We gotta protect Altmans and Jensen's moat. Can't have those Bad Guys compete and drive down profits.
No shit. My question is the real question, how can I make money straw-buying GPU's and smuggling them to China?
Did china ban them too? I mean.. why should a chinese company care about american regulation?
I’ve seen comments saying that many foundational model providers like DeepSeek haven’t done a full pretraining in a long time. Does that mean this use of chips is in reference to the past?
The ban is on Nvidia selling the chip to China. There is no ban on China using the chips. So long as NVidia isn't knowingly selling the chips to China this is a nothing burger.
hope so! why should computing technology be restricted based on country? this isn't a nuclear missile (and china already has those, with a much saner strategic policy than us too (we have no policy against preemptive strikes!))
ohhh nooo!
Doesn’t matter. Trump just lifted bans on the H200 to China , for a 25% cut. Until he is gone, everything is for sale.
"No shit Sherlock" moment
I'm shocked, shocked!
I thought this was common knowledge. DeepSeek’s Wikipedia entry says that they trained all their models on Nvidia chips procured before the U.S. embargo to China on them. It wouldn’t surprise me if they continued acquiring them through, well, less than legal means.
I also read somewhere (not Wikipedia) that they trained on ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini queries, basically feeding in the output of competitor’s LLMs as training data. Kinda surprised they didn’t run into model collapse problems, but they stole their training data from other people who stole their training data from data collections that arguably stole them from content creators. It’s bandits all the way down, so adding a little smuggling to that doesn’t surprise me.