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.
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DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
81–90 of 331 posts
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Unlike your typical free market fanboy, the Chinese leadership isn't stupid. They were always planning to do that, sanctions or no. Realistically, all sanctions can do is mess with their timelines for some temporary strategic advantage, slowing so…
"Planning to do it" is one thing, but thanks to Trump's erratic and corrupt trade policy, they now have a Manhattan Project-level incentive to make it happen. It's ridiculous to think they won't succeed, just by dint of sheer numbers alone.
> "Planning to do it" is one thing, but thanks to Trump's erratic and corrupt trade policy, they now have a Manhattan Project-level incentive to make it happen.
The plans weren't wishes, they were things they were actively working on to make happen. The point is they didn't need "Trump's erratic and corrupt trade policy" to motivate it, they were already motivated to do it anyway.
The US's problem is that its actions are uncoordinated. Sanctions and tariffs need to be coupled with massive investments to build new capabilities, and the latter is usually lacking. For instance, tariff revenue (and then some) should be poured directly into subsidies for building new facilities that support critical industries (like rare earths and electronics manufacturing). And things would probably be counterintuitively more effective if there was more tolerance of waste For instance, China's subsidized hundreds of solar panel manufacturers, none of them make money and a lot have probably failed, but the vicious domestic competition has helped them dominate that technology globally. The US freaked out in a massive scandal when one subsidized solar panel maker went out of business.
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#83What's strange in this discussion of chips and export bans is there's been zero discussion of cloud access, I guess networked computers are difficult for America's gerontocrats to understand. I've rented H100s no problem on American servers and there's no KYC or anything, they let anybody do it.
You can’t really spend $500k on AWS without doing some form of identity disclosure.
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#84Good. 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.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#85Are 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.
Afaik, data center grade blackwell chips have never been legal for export to china. I think this has more do to with NVIDIA than DeepSeek. For a brief moment, people thought DeepSeek had found some way to produce AI without sending boatloads of cash to NVIDIA, causing a drop in share price.
Shortly thereafter people realized they were probably just evading sanctions and ~stealing~ bootstrapping parameters from other models to reach their stated training cost. This report is just further reporting on that rumor.
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#86What do you want to bet ALL GPU's being manufactured by US sources have NSA requirements that now have built into the chips and firmware interesting "controls". They know what region of the world the chip is in, they have features to "brick them" in case of war, etc. Encrypted communication back to US servers required, or if denied, then GPU will not function, etc.
I’d bet good money. The chips have been decapped and roughly analyzed, the only information going into or out of them is from the host systems. Those are easy to convince they are anywhere. Chips don’t have wifi or gps or radios of any kind inside of them, and what the nvidia drivers send and receive to the world is easy to audit.
You give the tech too much credit.
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#87:shocked pikachu face:
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#88Related: Deepseek just leapfrogged the competition. Scores gold in 2025's IMO, IOI, and ICPC world finals with an openweights model.
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the keys being, of course, that the Chinese government doesn't care. Yeah it might require mules bringing the GPUs into China but once they're in China, no one is breaking any laws. Of course DeepSeek is using these GPUs! It's not illegal for them to do so!
Chinese government recently banned Chinese companies from buying Nvidia chips.
Yup, the change was in the news in September
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/china-blocks-sal...
Re: DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was just selling my RTX 4090 on Ebay recently and got a ton of bids from Chinese accounts. The winner ($2,325) had Australia set as the country on their profile, but a Chinese name on the account, and the order shipping address was to a different Chinese name (to a regular single-family house in Delaware). Most bidders straight up had China as their profile country. So my 4090 (24 GB) is probably going to get turne…
People with Chinese names do sometimes live in Delaware.
If you are selling in the US, and an account with a primary address overseas buys your item and uses a US shipping address, you are likely shipping to a package forwarder. These services are common because many people and businesses in the US only ship to the US.
I have my eBay account set this way, and I still get bids from overseas accounts -- I always Google the shipping address, 100% of the time it has been a package forwarder.