Deepseek reportedly received banned chips, and is allegedly using them to train a new model.
If some of Nvidia’s top-shelf GPUs—the physical artifacts currently at the center of the AI craze—hypothetically fell into the wrong hands, Nvidia’s next moves would have to placate a lot of parties, from shareholders to regulators to customers to China hawks in the Senate like Tom Cotton.
And a new report does say smuggled GPUs are now being used illegally by the Chinese company Deepseek, which, for someone like Cotton, would be like the One Ring being smuggled directly to Sauron. But for what it’s worth, Nvidia calls the details of the report “far-fetched.”
According to one of the tech news site The Information’s anonymously-sourced scoops, the Chinese AI company Deepseek is somehow training its latest models on Nvidia’s latest GPUs—ones built on the Blackwell architecture, pretty much the most in-demand pieces of technology in the universe.
