Overview
- A senior U.S. official said DeepSeek trained a soon-to-launch model on Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, which current U.S. rules prohibit from export to China.
- The official said DeepSeek likely removed technical identifiers of U.S. hardware and that the Blackwell systems are probably clustered at a data center in Inner Mongolia.
- The training likely relied on capability “distillation” from leading U.S. models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI, according to the official.
- Nvidia declined to comment, and the Commerce Department and DeepSeek did not respond; China’s embassy criticized what it called politicized use of export controls.
- The allegation is intensifying debate over limited chip exports such as the H200, with shipments still stalled under guardrails and any effect on licensing unresolved.