Report: FBI and White House are investigating DeepSeek’s access to Nvidia GPUs
Bloomberg is reporting that the White House and the FBI are investigating DeepSeek to find out if they evaded export controls to acquire Nvidia GPUs.
Ever since the AI world was rocked by the release of DeepSeek’s R1 models, questions have been swirling about how the Chinese startup was able to do so much with so little.
Some competitors (such as Elon Musk) have accused the company of acquiring large quantities of advanced Nvidia H100 GPUs that are not allowed to be exported to China due to national security concerns. DeepSeek said they used Nvidia H800 GPUs, which are slower models, tailored for the Chinese market to comply with US export controls.
The widely used Nvidia H100 GPUs are such hot commodities that they have been smuggled into China, or sold through a shady network of intermediaries.
OpenAI and partner Microsoft have also been pointing fingers at DeepSeek, accusing it of using ChatGPT to help build R1 (which is not that unusual in the industry).
Some competitors (such as Elon Musk) have accused the company of acquiring large quantities of advanced Nvidia H100 GPUs that are not allowed to be exported to China due to national security concerns. DeepSeek said they used Nvidia H800 GPUs, which are slower models, tailored for the Chinese market to comply with US export controls.
The widely used Nvidia H100 GPUs are such hot commodities that they have been smuggled into China, or sold through a shady network of intermediaries.
OpenAI and partner Microsoft have also been pointing fingers at DeepSeek, accusing it of using ChatGPT to help build R1 (which is not that unusual in the industry).
