A senior Trump administration official confirmed on Monday that the latest model of artificial intelligence from Chinese startup DeepSeek had been trained using Nvidia Blackwell processors. The information caused a stir in Washington, as Blackwell is currently the world’s most advanced AI chip, the export of which to China is strictly prohibited by US law.
According to US government findings, the computing infrastructure used by DeepSeek is located in a data centre in Inner Mongolia. Officials speculate that the startup will attempt to remove technical signatures from the upcoming model to hide the fact that US chips were being used. While the administration refuses to disclose the source of this information and the route the processors took to China, the incident highlights the leakiness of current technological barriers.
The situation exacerbates an ongoing dispute in Washington over strategy towards China’s AI sector. On the one hand, AI advisor David Sacks and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argue that allowing the sale of older or intentionally weakened units (like the H200) discourages Chinese companies from building their own alternatives. On the other hand, ‘hawks’ in the administration warn that the commercial success of startups such as DeepSeek directly supports Chinese military capabilities.
Headquartered in Hangzhou, DeepSeek has already gained notoriety for creating models that rival leading Silicon Valley products at significantly lower operating costs. However, current accusations suggest that this success may be based not only on engineering, but also on so-called model distillation – a technique that involves training its own systems on results generated by OpenAI, Google or Anthropic models.
