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DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-deepseek-uses-banned-nvidia-131207746.html
51•goodway•55m ago
(Original is https://www.theinformation.com/articles/deepseek-using-banne... but hardwalled)

Comments

cultofmetatron•34m ago
this is revenge for stealing their silkmoths isnt it?
smileson2•10m ago
the american century of humiliation begins
inamorty•5m ago
The opium will be full of sugar and preservatives though.
mullingitover•8m ago
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.

bilekas•33m ago
I don't think anyone is surprised by this.. And I'm almost certain nothing will happen. When manufacturing is next door to you, you'll find a way to get your hands on chips.
stronglikedan•26m ago
> And I'm almost certain nothing will happen.

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

embedding-shape•9m ago
> 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"?

strbean•29m ago
The phrasing "chips that are banned in the country" seems completely inaccurate. These are chips that the US does not allow to be exported to China. We do not have the power to ban anything in China, that's up to the Chinese government.
saubeidl•28m ago
Which they did! https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/17/china-tells-its-tech-compa...
Quothling•20m ago
Didn't China ban two processors for like 140 companies? It wouldn't be unlike China to ban modern Nvidia chipsets from Alibaba and similar while allowing Deepseek to do what they want. To win at both advancing domestic semiconductor development and also AI.
nemomarx•23m ago
I thought China also wanted them banned to dogfood domestic chips?
mongrelion•26m ago
I recommend everyone to watch GamersNexus' documentary on the NVIDIA AI GPU black market. They explain how companies like DeepSeek can get a hold of chips that are otherwise banned by the US government to export to China

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H3xQaf7BFI

embedding-shape•10m ago
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.
ok123456•26m ago
CIA disinformation campaigns notwithstanding, maybe accept global competition, open-source models, and the fact that whatever advantage OpenAI had was fleeting and mostly squandered at this point. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is especially brutal if you've never made a profit.
bee_rider•25m ago
It seems pretty difficult to prevent two other countries from trading, especially when it is sort of low-volume (I mean how many boats full of GPUs was this? It isn’t like oil or something, where we can see the infrastructure to consume it via satellite).
Shin--•25m ago
Good. Unsurprising (well, known), but good. In fact, the world would be a better place if the US would not use their influence to try to keep other countries down.
watwut•23m ago
China banned them tho.
Matl•6m ago
China banned them AFTER the US first banned them and then unbanned them and a series of unfriendly trade moves by the US.

This discussion where China is always purely dishonest, bad etc. without any context is honestly lame.

The Chinese ban is largely a political move designed to signal that they're not going to be pushed around. They pretty much know companies are using them, (and H100 in Thailand etc.) but as long as it sends a message and over time incentives domestic development, (which it does), then good as far as they're concerned.

codedokode•19m ago
Sanctions just slightly increase the cost of obtaining an item, but don't make it impossible. Electronic components can be bought, oil can be sold, ChatGPT can be used via OpenRouter, sanctioned banks publish their apps under guise into App Store, etc. When there are 200 countries in the world, and money involved, you can get anything.

Sanctioned goods could be used to spread propaganda though, imagine, for example, if installing a NVIDIA GPU driver required answering questions about Tiananmen square incident.

amarant•11m ago
Imagine the correct answer being "what incident?"
kspacewalk2•10m ago
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.
littlecranky67•9m ago
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.
mring33621•18m ago
ohhh nooo!
syntaxing•15m ago
Since the supply chain is all from the same place, they can get so creative and resourceful. You can get 48 and 96GB VRAM 3090 on the grey market which is pretty awesome.
SilverElfin•14m ago
I’ve seen comments saying that many foundational model providers like DeepSeek haven’t done a full pretraining in a long time. Does that mean this use of chips is in reference to the past?
ajsnigrutin•13m ago
Did china ban them too? I mean.. why should a chinese company care about american regulation?
rvnx•13m ago
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.

Through sanctions, the irony is that the west removed the incentive for China to respect IP laws.

Well done USA.

If they can solve the lithography/ASML issue by getting access to it, then they will be forced to win.

llm_nerd•12m ago
There is a sudden groundswell of reports about China using nvidia chips, always by unnamed sources, and I suspect if you could trace it back you'll find nvidia pulling the levers.

nvidia is facing a lot of competitive threats and their moat is being filled in. Google with their Ironwood TPU. Amazon with Trainium3. Even Apple is adding tensor cores to their chips, and if Apple went big scale it would be legitimate in the space as well.

We know that China has a number of upstart TPU vendors, and Huawei has built some "better than H200" solutions with a roadmap to much higher heights.

So there is suddenly a bunch of secret-source reports that no, China actually is totally reliant on nvidia. nvidia needs this to be true, or at least people to believe it to be true.

I mean, after all the fanfare about the H200 being allowed to be exported, nvidia shares...dropped. The market doesn't seem to be buying the China reliance bluster.

FergusArgyll•11m ago
I'm shocked, shocked!
protimewaster•10m ago
Are these chips that are now banned but we're previously available? If so, doesn't this basically mean nothing? They could just be using chips that they bought when they were allowed to buy them.
adamsb6•10m ago
Well if unnamed sources are saying it you know it has to be true.
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