Study Finds China's Top Open AI Models Were Trained on Export-Banned Nvidia Chips
A new study suggests leading open-weight AI models from Chinese companies were trained on Nvidia Blackwell chips that the U.S. barred from export to China. The finding adds pressure on Nvidia, whose CEO Jensen Huang left the company this week.
The leading open-weight artificial intelligence models built by Chinese companies appear to have been trained on Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that the U.S. government has banned from shipping to China, according to a new research effort reported by TechCrunch. The finding deepens the troubles of U.S. chipmaker Nvidia, whose CEO Jensen Huang left the company this week.
What the analysis found
Will DePue, a former OpenAI researcher who leads the nonprofit research group Unemployment Labs, examined the weights of language models released openly by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group. Weights still reflect the configuration of the chips used in training. DePue found compelling evidence that the most closely watched models, including Moonshot's Kimi K3 and DeepSeek's V4, bear the fingerprints of Blackwell training. White House technology adviser Michael Kratsios had said earlier this year, citing U.S. intelligence sources, that Moonshot used export-banned chips.
The study does not mean the models were trained solely on Nvidia hardware or that export laws were necessarily broken: the chips could have sat in an offshore data center, for example in Malaysia. Epoch AI, a nonprofit research organization, estimates 275,000 Nvidia accelerators were imported to Malaysia in 2024 and 2025, and about two million advanced chips reached China overall through schemes hiding their destination.
Huang's departure and Megaspeed
Huang left after admitting to an affair with Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, a company implicated in smuggling Nvidia chips into China. She has also been alleged to be an agent of China's intelligence service. Both the U.S. and Singapore have investigated Megaspeed. On Friday, Bloomberg reported that a company linked to Alice Huang was involved in sending banned chips to a data center in Shanghai. Nvidia and Huang had previously vouched for Megaspeed's data centers.
Policy backdrop
Blackwell exports to China are banned, while the Trump administration lets Nvidia sell the less powerful H200 if shipments take a circuitous route that allows the U.S. to claim a 25% tariff. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who oversees chip export licensing, could reportedly lose his job after claims his investigators missed suspicious buyers.
