The key facts

  • Former OpenAI researcher Will DePew found traces of training on Blackwell chips in the open weights of DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax and Ant Group models
  • Jensen Huang left Nvidia after admitting a relationship with Alice Huang, head of Megaspeed, which is accused of smuggling chips into China
  • Epoch AI estimates that roughly 2 million advanced chips reached China in 2024–2025 through schemes that concealed their end destination

Blackwell traces in open models

Leading open models from Chinese companies appear to have been trained on Nvidia chips that the US government banned from supplying to its main geopolitical rival. That is the conclusion of a new study: Will DePew, a former OpenAI researcher who heads the nonprofit group Unemployment Labs, analyzed the weights — the unique internal structure — of large language models released openly by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group. Weights retain traces of the chip configurations used in training, and in the most talked-about models, including Moonshot's Kimi K3 releases and the DeepSeek V4 models, DePew found compelling signs of training on Blackwell chips.

What is banned and what is allowed

Export of Blackwell to China or Chinese companies is banned; the Trump administration, meanwhile, allows Nvidia to ship the less powerful H200 provided it takes a circuitous delivery route that lets the US collect a 25% levy. White House technology adviser Michael Kratsios had earlier stated, citing intelligence, that Moonshot used Nvidia chips banned from export. The nonprofit Epoch AI estimates that about two million advanced chips reached China in 2024–2025 through schemes that concealed their final destination.

Offshore data centers and a loophole in controls

This by itself does not prove that the models were trained entirely on Nvidia chips or that export control laws were violated: the chips could have been located in an offshore data center — a popular way for Chinese companies to access compute, which has fueled a boom in Malaysia, where, by Epoch's estimate, 275,000 Nvidia AI accelerators were imported in 2024–2025. Yet preventing exactly this scenario is the stated purpose of the bans, and hardliners have long demanded controlling who uses the chips, not just who owns them. 'If we care about US technological hegemony, it makes no sense to me to ban Chinese companies from accessing chips in mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau, but say: go to Malaysia and do whatever you want,' said Sam Bresnick, a researcher at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, over the summer.

The Megaspeed case and Huang's departure

Megaspeed, led by Alice Huang, has been at the center of this trade for several years through its subsidiary Speedmatrix and is the subject of investigations in the US and Singapore; Bloomberg also reported that a company linked to Alice Huang was involved in smuggling banned chips to a data center in Shanghai. In May, the short seller Culper released a report on Nvidia's 'China problem': a significant share of revenue, it claimed, was driven by Chinese demand through remote data centers or smuggling, and Alice Huang's companies, it alleged, are backed by Chinese firms that are barred from access to US chips. This week, Jensen Huang left Nvidia after admitting a relationship with Alice Huang, who is also accused of working for Chinese intelligence. Although his personal ties drew the most attention, Nvidia's potential corporate liability for export control violations likely influenced the decision to part with him — while Nvidia and Huang himself insisted that company representatives had visited Megaspeed data centers and confirmed their legitimacy.

Unresolved questions

Culper's bet against Nvidia was built not on the expectation of an American crackdown but on Beijing's response: a pivot to its own chip industry, which could wipe out billions of dollars of Chinese demand. Meanwhile, according to reports, about 600,000 H200 chips have piled up in Hong Kong awaiting delivery to China, and observers disagree on the reasons for the delay: Graham Webster of Stanford is skeptical of the theory that it is meant to spur domestic production, while other explanations include preparation for a trade deal or concerns about built-in tracking capabilities. For now, US companies face few obligations to track how buyers use controlled goods, but if investigators confirm the smuggling and Huang's awareness, Nvidia's problems will become considerably more serious. The government is also under fire: it was reported that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick could lose his post because his investigators failed to identify suspicious chip buyers and were too close to Nvidia's leadership.