// TECHCRUNCH — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Export-banned Nvidia chips are behind China’s most powerful AI models — uh oh, Jensen!
The leading open-weight models developed by Chinese companies were trained on Nvidia chips that the U.S. government restricted from shipping to its largest geopolitical rival, a new research effort claims.
The apparently widespread access to Blackwell GPUs among Chinese frontier labs shows the magnitude of the problem facing the leading chip designer. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang left the company this week after admitting to his affair with Alice Huang, executive of Megaspeed, a company implicated in smuggling Nvidia chips into China. Alice Huang has also been alleged to be an agent of China’s intelligence service.
While Jensen Huang’s relationships with a customer and two employees have drawn the most public interest, Nvidia’s potential corporate liability for export control violations likely factored into its decision to part ways with Huang.
U.S. export controls are intended to protect the country’s leadership in AI capabilities against China, but Huang has long sought to open up that market. Blackwell GPUs are banned from export to China or Chinese-owned firms, while the Trump administration allows Nvidia to export the H200, a less powerful chip, provided shipments take a circuitous shipping route that allows the U.S. to claim a 25% tariff.
Will DePue, a former OpenAI researcher who leads the nonprofit research group Unemployment Labs, analyzed the weights — the unique structure — of large language models released openly by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, and Ant Group. The weights still reflect the configurations of the chips used to train them, and DePue was able to find compelling evidence that the most closely watched models, including Moonshot’s Kimi’s K3 releases and DeepSeek’s V4 models, bear fingerprints from training on Blackwell chips.
White House technology adviser Michael Kratsios said earlier this year that Moonshot had used export-banned Nvidia chips, citing U.S. intelligence sources. Epoch AI, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that about two million advanced chips entered China in 2024 and 2025 through schemes designed to hide their final destination.
That doesn’t mean that these models were trained entirely on Nvidia chips, or that export control laws were necessarily violated; the chips could have been in an offshore data center, which has proven a popular way for Chinese firms to access compute and driven an industrial revolution in Malaysia. Epoch’s data estimates that 275,000 Nvidia AI accelerators were imported to Malaysia in 2024 and 2025.
However, the ostensible goal of the export bans is to prevent exactly that: Chinese AI labs training on the most powerful chips. China hawks have long called for stronger controls on who uses chips, not just who owns them or where they are installed.
“If we care about the U.S. tech edge, it doesn’t make any sense to me that you would not allow Chinese companies to access chips in mainland China or Hong Kong and Macau, but then say, actually, if you just go over to Malaysia, you can do whatever you want,” Sam Bresnick, a researcher at the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told TechCrunch this summer.
Megaspeed, the company led by Alice Huang, has been at the center of that trade for several years through its subsidiary Speedmatrix, and has been the subject of investigations by both the U.S. and Singaporean government. Friday, Bloomberg also reported that a company with links to Alice Huang was involved in smuggling banned Nvidia chips to a data center in Shanghai.