 "An illustration of the Deepseek logo. File image/Reuters")
At a time when the US and China are seeking more cooperation in tech and AI, the chairman of a US House of Representatives committee has claimed that chipmaker Nvidia provided DeepSeek with the necessary hardware to improve its capabilities and later help the Chinese military.
DeepSeek shook markets early last year with a set of AI models that rivalled some of the best offerings from the United States but were developed with far less computing power, fuelling concerns in Washington that China could catch up with the US in AI despite US restrictions on the sale of high-powered computing chips to China.
Rep John Moolenar wrote a letter to US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said documents obtained by the committee from Nvidia showed the achievement came after extensive technical assistance from the chipmaker.
“According to Nvidia records, Nvidia technology development personnel helped DeepSeek achieve major training efficiency gains through an ‘optimised co-design of algorithms, frameworks, and hardware,’ with internal reporting boasting that ‘DeepSeek-V3 requires only 2.788M H800 GPU hours for its full training’ - less than what US developers typically require for frontier-scale models,” Moolenaar wrote in the letter.
Did Nvidia help DeepSeek?
The letter, seen by Reuters, says that the document has information about Nvidia’s activities from 2024. Moolenar wrote that the time when Nvidia provided technical help to DeepSeek, there were no indications that the Chinese AI model’s capabilities were being used in the military.
“Nvidia treated DeepSeek accordingly - as a legitimate commercial partner deserving of standard technical support,” Moolenaar wrote.
“If even the world’s most valuable company cannot rule out the military use of its products when sold to (Chinese) entities, rigorous licensing restrictions and enforcement are essential to prevent such assurances from becoming superficial formalities,” Moolenaar added.
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Meanwhile, China has approved three of its largest tech companies to purchase Nvidia’s H200 artificial intelligence chips, marking a significant shift in policy as the country seeks to catch up in the AI race.
ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have been shown the green light to buy more than 400,000 H200 chips in total. Other tech companies are now waiting in the queue to get similar approvals from the government.
However, sources have told the news agency that Beijing has allowed the purchase, not without a set of conditions that are being decided upon currently. Licenses are too restrictive, and customers were not yet converting the approvals to purchase orders.