U.S. chipmaker Nvidia reportedly provided technical support to Chinese AI company DeepSeek, whose technology U.S. officials say is aiding China’s military. The development raises concerns that Beijing could close the AI gap with Washington, even amid restrictions on advanced chip exports.
In a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), who chairs the House Select Committee on China, said documents obtained by the committee from Nvidia showed the achievement came after extensive technical assistance from Nvidia.
"According to NVIDIA records, NVIDIA technology development personnel helped DeepSeek achieve major training efficiency gains through an 'optimized 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 U.S. developers typically require for frontier-scale models," Moolenaar wrote in the letter.
Reuters contributed to this report.