Export-banned Nvidia chips are behind China’s most powerful AI models — uh-oh, Jensen!

Unemployment Labs researcher Will DePue analyzed the weights of openly released models from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group and found evidence that models including Moonshot's Kimi K3 releases and DeepSeek's V4 bear fingerprints of training on export-banned Blackwell chips. Epoch AI estimates about two million advanced chips entered China in 2024 and 2025 through schemes hiding their final destination, though the chips could have been in offshore data centers such as those in Malaysia, which imported an estimated 275,000 Nvidia AI accelerators in that period. The article also reports that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang left the company this week after admitting an affair with Alice Huang, an executive of Megaspeed, a company implicated in smuggling Nvidia chips into China.