Chinese AI labs are training models on Nvidia's Blackwell despite export controls, says ex-OpenAI engineer
How DePue reached his conclusion The analysis published through DePue's consultancy, "Top Chinese Frontier AI Models Carry the Fingerprint of Export-Controlled Nvidia Blackwell GPUs," takes a different approach: analyzing the published weights of various models from Chinese AI labs.
Key points
- On Monday, US Senators Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) cited Jensen Huang's "relationship with a suspected Chinese spy" as a justification for passing the AI Overwatch Act, which would codify the Trump administration's existing chip export controls.
- Four of the models match Grace Blackwell, the GB200 and GB300 parts in Nvidia's flagship liquid-cooled rack-scale systems." Noting that this is the first time MiniMax and Ant Group have been publicly linked to usage of Nvidia's Blackwell, he also cited several limitations to his approach.
- One is that usage of Blackwell GPUs doesn't prove where the GPUs were located, so it's possible some of these Chinese labs used this hardware through US providers – a loophole the Cloud Security Act aims to close.
US export controls are not stopping AI labs in China from using restricted Nvidia chips, according to a report from a former OpenAI engineer.
Additional details
- "In doing so, I found conclusive evidence that six Chinese AI models – including DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Kimi K3, and MiniMax-M3 – were initialized on Nvidia Blackwell systems.
- DePue's report includes initial seed values that linked DeepSeek-V3 to Nvidia's Hopper and DeepSeek-V4-Flash to Blackwell, for those….
- The resignation of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang followed from revelations that he had an affair with Chinese businesswoman Alice Huang, who, in 2023, founded Singapore-based Megaspeed International.
- Huang's departure coincides with a renewed push to tighten US chip export controls.
- Using PyTorch, initialization can be done by creating multiple GPU threads that work in parallel, with the help of Nvidia's cuRAND library.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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