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The US Home of Representatives China committee has requested Nvidia to elucidate whether or not and the way Chinese language firm DeepSeek obtained export-controlled chips to energy its synthetic intelligence app, which lawmakers say poses a nationwide safety menace.
John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the panel, and his Democratic counterpart Raja Krishnamoorthi on Wednesday wrote to Nvidia to acquire details about their gross sales to China and south-east Asia.
The letter got here after the panel launched a report that stated DeepSeek, which skilled its mannequin on Nvidia chips, posed a “profound menace” to US nationwide safety.
Moolenaar stated DeepSeek was a “weapon within the Chinese language Communist occasion’s arsenal, designed to spy on Individuals, steal our know-how, and subvert US regulation”.
The US has lately launched sweeping export controls designed to make it tougher for Chinese language teams to acquire superior American know-how that would assist its army.
Scrutiny from the committee will increase strain on Nvidia over whether or not its subtle chips are being covertly offered to China, which the corporate has lengthy stated it really works to keep away from.
Moolenaar claimed that DeepSeek “exploited US AI fashions and reportedly used superior Nvidia chips that ought to by no means have ended up in Chinese language Communist occasion arms . . . That’s why we’re sending a letter to Nvidia to demand solutions”.
Nvidia on Wednesday pushed again strongly in opposition to any suggestion it may be chargeable for export-controlled chips falling into the incorrect arms, saying it adopted the federal government’s instructions on the place it may well or can not promote chips “to the letter”.
“The know-how business helps America when it exports to well-known firms worldwide. If the federal government felt in any other case, it will instruct us,” Nvidia added.
The report got here a day after it emerged that the US had imposed export controls on Nvidia promoting H20 chips to China, blindsiding the corporate, which had anticipated aid from the restrictions. In a regulatory submitting, it stated the controls would decrease its earnings by $5.5bn within the quarter to April 27.
Nvidia depends on a posh community of provide chain companions akin to Dell and Supermicro, which bundle its chips into servers and promote on to clients.
It addressed solutions within the congressional report that clients in China could also be accessing its export-controlled chips through subsidiaries in Singapore, which accounted for 18 per cent of its 2025 fiscal yr income, or $23.7bn.
Nvidia stated the income it experiences from Singapore was based mostly on billing addresses, that means it usually included subsidiaries of US firms. “The related merchandise are shipped to different places, together with america and Taiwan, to not China,” it stated.
The China committee’s report stated DeepSeek transmitted information utilizing infrastructure that was related to China Cell, a significant Chinese language telecoms supplier that the Pentagon has designated as having connections to the nation’s army.
It added that DeepSeek additionally built-in monitoring instruments from giant Chinese language tech teams, together with ByteDance, the proprietor of TikTok, along with Baidu, a Chinese language web search engine, and Tencent.
“This entangles DeepSeek’s information harvesting structure with [People’s Republic of China] firms recognized for his or her roles in surveillance and CCP management, heightening the chance that international adversary entities may achieve entry to Individuals’ non-public data,” the report stated.
The Chinese language embassy in Washington didn’t reply to a request for remark. DeepSeek couldn’t instantly be reached for remark.
DeepSeek sparked a tech market rout earlier this yr when it introduced breakthroughs that appeared to shift the steadiness of energy in an AI arms race between Washington and Beijing.
In January Nvidia had about $600bn wiped off its market valuation as traders reacted to experiences that DeepSeek had skilled fashions that have been aggressive with the most recent choices from teams akin to OpenAI at a fraction of the associated fee and utilizing far much less computing energy.
DeepSeek stated it skilled its “R1” mannequin utilizing clusters of Nvidia’s H800 chips, that are much less highly effective variations of its H100 chip. The H800 was particularly designed for the Chinese language market to adjust to US export controls and was later blocked by the Biden administration in 2023.
