White House and FBI officials are investigating whether Chinese startup DeepSeek purchased advanced Nvidia semiconductors through third parties in Singapore to circumvent US restrictions.
Sources told Bloomberg about this.
Nvidia said it requires its partners to comply with all laws and responds to any violations. Earlier this week, the company said it did not believe DeepSeek violated U.S. restrictions.
Howard Lutnick, President Donald Trumpʼs pick to head the Commerce Department, suggested on Wednesday that DeepSeek was evading US export controls.
“They bought a huge number of Nvidia chips, found a way to get around the restrictions, and now they are using them in their DeepSeek AI model. This has to stop. If they want to compete with us, let them do it fairly, not using our technology. I will strictly monitor this issue,” he told the Senate.
DeepSeek R1, released this month in Hangzhou, China, is capable of mimicking human thinking, which could pose a threat to a market currently dominated by OpenAI and American companies, and has already caused a $1 trillion market crash.
What is DeepSeek?
On January 27, DeepSeek overtook ChatGPT to become the most popular free app on the App Store. On the same day, the Chinese chatbot was subjected to a large-scale cyberattack.
DeepSeek was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, a 40-year-old graduate of the School of Information and Electronic Engineering. He set up a store for Nvidia A100 chips, which are now banned from being exported to China. Media reports suggest that this may have prompted him to launch DeepSeek, combining those chips with cheaper, lower-end ones that are still available for import.
DeepSeek is based on the open-source DeepSeek-V3 model. Some experts say that the model was developed for less than $6 million — competitors spend much more. However, other experts dispute this information.
OpenAI, the creator of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, said on January 29 that Chinese companies are “constantly” trying to use American competitors to improve their AI models.
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