Study: China's top AI models trained on export-banned Nvidia chips
A new research effort claims leading Chinese open-weight AI models were trained on Nvidia Blackwell chips that the US bars from export to China. Nvidia 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 chips, whose export to China the US government has banned, according to a new research effort reported by TechCrunch. The finding adds pressure on Nvidia, the US chip designer whose chief executive, Jensen Huang, left the company this week.
What the analysis found
Will DePue, a former OpenAI researcher who leads the nonprofit group Unemployment Labs, examined the weights of large language models released openly by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group. Weights retain traces of the chip configurations used in training, and DePue reported evidence that the most closely watched models, including Moonshot's Kimi K3 and DeepSeek's V4, carry fingerprints of Blackwell training.
White House technology adviser Michael Kratsios said earlier this year, citing US intelligence sources, that Moonshot had used export-banned chips. Epoch AI, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that roughly two million advanced chips entered China in 2024 and 2025 through schemes that concealed their destination.
That does not mean the models were trained solely on Nvidia hardware or that export laws were necessarily broken. The chips could have been in an offshore data center, for example in Malaysia, which received an estimated 275,000 Nvidia AI accelerators in 2024 and 2025.
Huang's exit and Megaspeed
Huang departed after admitting an affair with Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, a company implicated in smuggling Nvidia chips into China. Alice Huang has also been alleged to be an agent of China's intelligence service. Both US and Singaporean authorities have investigated Megaspeed. On Friday, Bloomberg reported that a company linked to Alice Huang was involved in smuggling banned chips to a data center in Shanghai.
The US currently lets Nvidia export the less powerful H200 chip if shipments follow a route that lets the US claim a 25% tariff. About 600,000 H200 chips are reportedly stockpiled in Hong Kong awaiting shipment into China.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who oversees the agencies licensing chip exports, could reportedly lose his job after reports that his investigators failed to uncover suspicious buyers.
