Nvidia's Best Chips May Be Powering China's Military—Via DeepSeek

A senior U.S. official revealed on Monday that the Chinese AI company DeepSeek is supporting the Asian nation’s military and intelligence agencies and found ways around U.S. export restrictions on advanced semiconductor chips. 

The Details: DeepSeek provided AI technology that uses advanced U.S. chips to China's military, despite Washington’s efforts to prevent such tech from being accessible to China, according to a Reuters report. 

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“We understand that DeepSeek has willingly provided and will likely continue to provide support to China’s military and intelligence operations,” a senior State Department official told Reuters in an interview.

The official said that DeepSeek provides Beijing's surveillance operators with user information and statistics. 

“This effort goes above and beyond open-source access to DeepSeek’s AI models,” the anonymous official said.

The same U.S.official told Reuters that DeepSeek was using "workarounds" to gain access to advanced chips from the U.S. and that the company has access to “large volumes” of NVIDIA Corp.'s NVDA H100 chips. 

Three separate sources familiar with the matter also told Reuters that DeepSeek has Nvidia's H100 chips that it obtained after the U.S. banned Nvidia from selling those chips to China

“Our review indicates that DeepSeek used lawfully acquired H800 products, not H100,” an Nvidia spokesman said, responding to Reuters about DeepSeek’s alleged usage of H100 chips.

DeepSeek has not publicly responded to these allegations. 

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