Export-Banned Nvidia Chips Are Behind China’s Most Powerful AI Models, New Research Claims

A nonprofit’s analysis of open-weight models finds fingerprints of Blackwell GPUs in Chinese frontier systems, deepening the export control controversy swirling around Nvidia.

A Finding That Cuts to the Core of U.S. Policy

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, according to a new research effort.

The apparently widespread access to Blackwell GPUs among Chinese frontier labs shows the magnitude of the problem facing the leading chip designer. It also lands at a fraught moment: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang left the company this week after admitting to his affair with Alice Huang, an 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 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 him.

What the Research Found

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 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 found compelling evidence that the most closely watched models, including Moonshot’s Kimi 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.

The Offshore Loophole

That does not necessarily mean these models were trained entirely on Nvidia chips, or that export control laws were violated. The chips could have been in an offshore data center, a route that has proven popular for Chinese firms seeking compute and has driven an industrial boom 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.

Sam Bresnick, a researcher at the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology, put the inconsistency plainly to TechCrunch this summer. If the U.S. cares about its tech edge, he argued, it makes no sense to bar Chinese companies from accessing chips in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau while allowing them to do whatever they want from Malaysia.

Megaspeed at the Center

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 governments. On 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.

In May, the short-selling research firm Culper published a report arguing that Nvidia had a China problem because a significant share of its revenue was driven by Chinese demand, either through remote data centers or smuggling in violation of U.S. law. It detailed Megaspeed’s relationship with Nvidia and alleged that Alice Huang’s companies are backed by Chinese firms barred from accessing U.S. chips.

Ironically, Culper’s bet against Nvidia was not driven by the expectation of a U.S. government crackdown. Instead, it focused on the Chinese government’s response to the bans, which was to recommit to its domestic chip industry. If China succeeds, billions of dollars in Chinese demand for Nvidia chips could dry up. Some 600,000 H200 chips are reportedly stockpiled in Hong Kong, awaiting shipment into China.

Graham Webster, a research scholar at Stanford who focuses on U.S.-China technology policy, said he does not buy the idea that holding the chips back would drive domestic production, since demand is so large. Other theories for the hold-up include preparation for a potential trade deal involving large volumes of U.S. goods, or concerns about surveillance technology embedded in the chips.

Nvidia’s Exposure

For now, U.S. companies have limited obligations to track what their customers do with controlled goods like AI chips. However, Huang’s personal and professional entanglements with Alice Huang create a much bigger problem for Nvidia if government investigators confirm that chip smuggling took place and that he was aware of it. Nvidia and Huang have both vouched for Megaspeed’s data centers, saying Nvidia officials had visited them to confirm they were legitimate.

The U.S. government’s treatment of Nvidia and Megaspeed is also under scrutiny. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, who oversees the agencies that license chip exports, could reportedly lose his job after reports that his investigators failed to uncover suspicious chip buyers and were too cozy with Nvidia officials.

Conclusion

The research findings, if borne out, suggest that U.S. export controls have not prevented Chinese labs from training frontier models on the most powerful American chips. Whether that happened through smuggling, offshore data centers, or both, the practical effect is the same: the policy’s core objective is being undermined.

For Nvidia, the convergence of the export control question with the Huang scandal is dangerous. The company’s potential liability now depends on what investigators determine about chip flows, what Huang knew, and whether Nvidia’s assurances about Megaspeed hold up. For policymakers, the episode exposes a structural weakness: rules that govern where chips are installed rather than who ultimately uses them are only as strong as the enforcement behind them.

The coming weeks will determine whether this becomes a compliance problem for one company or a broader reckoning for the entire export control regime.

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