Deepseek Uses Banned Nvidia Chips for AI Model, Report Says

and tea while stuffing them full of opium

and their proprietary tea strains

and forcing them to allow opium to be sold in their country

and forcing them to give up major port cities and open up trade against their wishes

Honestly whenever China gets around to getting its served-extremely-cold revenge for all the savagery committed against it in the 19th and 20th centuries, some chips are going to be the least of everyone's problems.

> And I'm almost certain nothing will happen.

The Chinese government has done more for less so I wouldn't be so certain.

> And I'm almost certain nothing will happen

What realistically could happen? Nvidia is already prohibited from selling their GPUs to China, I guess if you wanted it to really stop, you'd need to prohibit Nvidia from selling GPUs in any other country but the US, and require some sort of government controlled license to be able to buy it inside the US. Neither of which sound like realistic options.

So what could anyone really do, to "solve" this "problem"?

Which they did! https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/17/china-tells-its-tech-compa...

it's the standard USian view that their laws apply worldwide

I thought China also wanted them banned to dogfood domestic chips?

Yeah, or just jump unto Alibaba and Ebay from any neighboring country to China and see for yourself how easy it would be to buy a GPU then transport yourself ~500m and now be within China with these GPUs.

I was just selling my RTX 4090 on Ebay recently and got a ton of bids from Chinese accounts. The winner ($2,325) had Australia set as the country on their profile, but had a Chinese name on the account and another Chinese name on the order shipping address (a normal house in Delaware).

So my 4090 (24 GB) is probably going to get turned into a 48/96 GB VRAM frankenstein in a Chinese chop shop. I haven't watched the full 3.5 hour documentary you linked but from the first few minutes, it seems quite interesting. And covers this exact thing.

One of the keys being, of course, that the Chinese government doesn't care. Yeah it might require mules bringing the GPUs into China but once they're in China, no one is breaking any laws. Of course DeepSeek is using these GPUs! It's not illegal for them to do so!

Where does nvidia manufacture those chips?

China banned them tho.

"In fact, the world would be a better place if the US would not use their influence to try to keep other countries down."

acting like china wouldn't doing the same thing to other country if they ever weld such position

every great power would do the same thing to defend their position, its not unique to the US. only because current incumbent power is we see things this way

I agree that a fair playing field for everyone would be the ideal state.

But let's not pretend China doesn't use their influence to keep other countries down as well, and let's not pretend they allow a fair playing field for foreign competitors domestically either.

The US would not have imposed these targeted sanctions if China simply wanted to fairly compete in the marketplace.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

China has promised to wage war and forcibly subjugate Taiwan, a democratic ally and critical trade partner. If China backed off Taiwan for a few decades, I think the US would drop export controls.

It’s debatable whether it’s a better use of US power and resources to try to stop PRC from obtaining these chips versus, say, sinking the Chinese fishing fleets actively wrecking entire ecosystems. I probably agree with you that on balance working on the later problem has a higher long term ROI.

I agree, except with the word "slightly". It can be so significant that this increased cost/friction is the very mechanism of the sanctions' effectiveness. Is it possible to police the Russian oil shadow fleet to extinction? Maybe, but even without doing so you can impose a decent haircut on their profits by issuing scary-sounding press releases and leaving it at that.

This. And it should be obvious. Drugs are banned and illegal in almost every country, yet they reach the US in vast amounts. Why would a ban on GPUs suddenly work - especially since owning a truckload of GPU is perfectly legal in most countries. Smuggling them to where the demand is, is probably easier than smuggling drugs.

This is tangential but the whole Tiananmen Square thing is kind of odd. When I visited China many people were more willing to discuss it than I had imagined. Some spoke about it unsolicited. It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for. It’s rather subtle what can and cannot be discussed relating to it. Those I spoke to about it told me that most people have a good understanding of what happened, and many people speak negatively of the CCP. You just can’t do it if you have a major platform (e.g. you’re Jack Ma or you are an LLM).

Not to discount how negative free speech restrictions are, but I’m not so sure how effective that particular propaganda campaign would be.

Imagine the correct answer being "what incident?"

Where can you get 48/96GB 3090s? I know there are 24GB customized RTX 2080s (there were a few on ebay even last I checked) but I've never even heard of the 3090 being upgraded before.

Whilst there aren't many papers on the matter, I would guess that pretraining from scratch is a bit of a waste of money when you could simply expand the depth/width of the 'old' model and retrain only the 'new' bit.

Even if they're not doing full-from-scratch training every cycle, any serious model updates still soak up GPU hours

Yes. China banned NVidia. Jensen Huang said NVidia is the first one in the history banned by both sides. So Deepseek might find a way to get around Chinese government ban if the claim is true

> 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.

Unlike your typical free market fanboy, the Chinese leadership isn't stupid. They were always planning to do that, sanctions or no.

Realistically, all sanctions can do is mess with their timelines for some temporary strategic advantage, slowing some things down and forcing reallocation of investment away from other areas into the sanctioned areas.

I don't know much about GPUs, but is there really any value in IP? I can learn to write HDL code all day long (especially with AI helper), but turning it into real transistors is the hard part.

I thought it was impossible for them to leapfrog without actively occupying the TSMC fab as it takes years and years just to dial-in the insane precision.

Not only am I not shocked, I am in no way offended as to who is doing the "stealing"

Afaik, data center grade blackwell chips have never been legal for export to china. I think this has more do to with NVIDIA than DeepSeek. For a brief moment, people thought DeepSeek had found some way to produce AI without sending boatloads of cash to NVIDIA, causing a drop in share price.

Shortly thereafter people realized they were probably just evading sanctions and ~stealing~ bootstrapping parameters from other models to reach their stated training cost. This report is just further reporting on that rumor.

“banned” is a misnomer. The chips aren’t banned in China. Nvidia is banned from selling them to Chinese people and companies.

There is nothing stopping some intermediary from buying them from a non-sanctioned country, and then reselling them to Chinese people. I don’t even think any laws would be broken in that case.

You can’t really spend $500k on AWS without doing some form of identity disclosure.

I don't think DeepSeek could do that in the volume they need

You should really seek to actually understand an issue before you comment so arrogantly.

US authorities are ok with Chinese companies accessing GPUs in overseas DCs because those DCs will still be subject any US export controls. Right now, we don’t really care if Chinese companies are building tier-2 LLMs on US gear. If China invades Taiwan or frontier models approach AGI, we will shut down those Malaysian and Thai data centers overnight.

[delayed]

OpenAi, Anthropic, etc have access to specialized network topologies from high profile relationships with cloud providers. I don't think you can get anything like that off the shelf.

sure but to do this at scale you need better control of the networking layer than they typically give you, and there will definitely be KYC at a certain point in the process

Yes, it’s easy, cheap and it works. Maybe they need a super big volume and all the GPUs in the same space, to guarantee minimum latency.

I mean, I thought the paranoia was about China making their own models with their own chips. If they're renting USA models via the cloud, that's "good".

The wild part is that it sounds sci-fi, but the reality is probably way less glamorous

I very don't like to be a snob -- which I'm sure it'll sound like anyways -- but it's linear algebra silicon isn't it, more than AI silicon? To put things in perspective anyways.

Illegal video gamers playing 3d shooters in virtual world using contraband gpus

I believe it is very much a two-way ban, depending on the specific chips [0].

[0]: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/9/17/china-bans-tech-...