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.
China banned them tho.
DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
11–20 of 331 posts
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#12The 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.
I thought China also wanted them banned to dogfood domestic chips?
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#13The 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.
Which they did! https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/17/china-tells-its-tech-compa...
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.
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#14Sanctions 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.
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#15ohhh nooo!
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#16Since 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.
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#17I’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?
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#18Did china ban them too? I mean.. why should a chinese company care about american regulation?
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#19Long 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.
If they can solve the lithography/ASML issue by getting access to it, then they will be forced to win.
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#20There 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.