DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Obviousness and Practical Limits of the Ban

  • Many commenters see DeepSeek using Nvidia as entirely unsurprising; export controls are likened to the “war on drugs”: they raise costs but don’t stop access.
  • Sanctions are viewed as mainly adding friction, not preventing determined buyers—especially when the good is small, high value, and easy to move compared to, say, oil.

How Chips Reach China (Grey Markets & Loopholes)

  • Described channels include:
    • Buying high‑end GPUs in neighboring or third countries (Singapore, India, etc.) and moving them over the border.
    • Use of eBay / Alibaba, freight forwarders, and “mules” who resell consumer and datacenter GPUs into China.
    • Shadow data centers in Southeast Asia or the Middle East that legally buy chips and resell compute capacity to Chinese firms.
  • Some firsthand anecdotes from GPU sellers support the idea of an active grey export market.

“Banned in China” vs US Export Controls

  • Several note the article’s wording is misleading: the primary restriction is US export control, not an outright Chinese domestic ban.
  • Others point out China has also restricted certain Nvidia SKUs for state‑funded or major tech firms to push domestic chips, while tacitly tolerating grey‑market use (“open one eye, close one eye”).

Proposed Technical Controls – and Skepticism

  • One thread proposes license‑lease schemes where GPUs require periodically renewed cryptographic licenses tied to serials, theoretically allowing Nvidia/US to cut off sanctioned users.
  • Pushback: state‑backed actors could jailbreak firmware; hardware can be air‑gapped; and black markets would simply adapt. Many see this as further “enshittification” that would also hurt ordinary users.

Cloud Access and Enforcement Gaps

  • Several note how easy it is to rent H100s from US cloud providers with minimal KYC; large‑scale use might trigger more checks, but current practice is loose.
  • Some argue US authorities tolerate Chinese access via foreign data centers because those can be quickly shut off if geopolitics (e.g., Taiwan) escalate.

Sanctions, Geopolitics, and Strategic Backfire

  • Debate over whether export controls “keep China down” or simply accelerate its Manhattan‑Project‑style push to build domestic GPUs and lithography, eventually creating a parallel ecosystem that competes with Nvidia globally.
  • Others counter that China was already on this path; sanctions mainly adjust timelines and reallocate Chinese investment.

DeepSeek’s Training and Model Ethics

  • Commenters suggest DeepSeek’s low reported training cost is partly due to:
    • Using banned Nvidia GPUs obtained indirectly.
    • Distilling from outputs of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.
  • There’s vigorous moral debate but little sympathy for US labs: many see all frontier models as built on “pirated” or scraped data, so “bandits all the way down.”
  • Open‑weights Chinese models are praised by some as a way to erode the moat of closed US incumbents, regardless of how the hardware was obtained.