Open-weight AI models from several Chinese developers, including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group, were trained on Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that US export controls bar from shipment to China, according to research by Will DePue, a former OpenAI researcher who leads the nonprofit Unemployment Labs. DePue examined the published weights of the models and found evidence that the most closely watched releases, among them Moonshot's Kimi K3 and DeepSeek's V4, carry fingerprints of Blackwell training, the research effort claims.
The finding lands as Nvidia confronts the departure of CEO Jensen Huang, who left the company this week after admitting to an affair with Alice Huang, an executive of 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. While Jensen Huang's relationships with a customer and two employees have drawn the most public interest, Nvidia's potential corporate liability for export control violations likely factored into its decision to part ways with him, the article reports.
US export controls are meant to preserve American leadership in AI against China, but Jensen Huang has long pushed to open that market. Blackwell GPUs are banned from export to China or Chinese-owned firms, while the Trump administration permits Nvidia to ship the less powerful H200 provided the shipments follow a circuitous route that lets the US claim a 25% tariff. White House technology adviser Michael Kratsios said earlier this year, citing US intelligence sources, that Moonshot had used export-banned Nvidia chips, and Epoch AI estimates that about two million advanced chips entered China in 2024 and 2025 through schemes designed to hide their final destination.
The research does not establish that the models were trained entirely on Nvidia chips or that export control laws were necessarily violated, since the chips could have sat in an offshore data center, a route Chinese firms have used to access compute and one that has driven an industrial revolution in Malaysia. Epoch estimates that 275,000 Nvidia AI accelerators were imported to Malaysia in 2024 and 2025. Sam Bresnick, a researcher at the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told TechCrunch this summer that it makes no sense to bar Chinese companies from chips in mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau while allowing them to operate freely in Malaysia if the US cares about its technology edge.
Megaspeed, led by Alice Huang, has been at the center of that trade for years through its subsidiary Speedmatrix and has been investigated by both the US and Singaporean governments. Bloomberg also reported Friday that a company linked to Alice Huang was involved in smuggling banned Nvidia chips to a data center in Shanghai. In May, the short-selling research firm Culper published a report arguing that Nvidia had a China problem because a significant share of its revenue was driven by Chinese demand, either through remote data centers or smuggling in violation of US law; it detailed Megaspeed's relationship with Nvidia and alleged that Alice Huang's companies are backed by Chinese firms barred from accessing US chips.
Culper's bet against Nvidia was not driven by the expectation of a US government crackdown but by Beijing's response to the bans, which was to recommit to its domestic chip industry, the report said. Some 600,000 H200 chips are reportedly stockpiled in Hong Kong awaiting shipment into China, and observers have no consensus on why they have not been cleared for import. Graham Webster, a research scholar at Stanford focused on US-China technology policy, said he does not buy the idea that holding the chips back would drive domestic production given the scale of demand; other theories include preparation for a potential trade deal involving large volumes of US goods or concerns about surveillance technology in the chips.
For now, US companies have limited obligations to track what customers do with controlled goods such as AI chips. Nvidia and Jensen Huang have both vouched for Megaspeed's data centers, saying Nvidia officials visited them to confirm they were legitimate. The article also reports that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who oversees the agencies that license chip exports, could reportedly lose his job after reports that his investigators failed to uncover suspicious chip buyers and were too cozy with Nvidia officials.
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