The Trump administration is reportedly probing whether DeepSeek bought Nvidia’s advanced computer chips through Singapore – despite US export controls blocking the sale of the powerful technology to China-based firms.
Key tech leaders, including Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey, have been skeptical of DeepSeek’s claim that it trained an AI model on par with US rivals for less than $6 million and without Nvidia’s most powerful chips.
Officials at the White House and the FBI are investigating whether DeepSeek may have acquired the banned chips from third parties in Singapore to get around the ban, Bloomberg reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.
Separately, top lawmakers in the House’s select committee on China urged the Trump administration to “ensure [China] will not exploit regulatory gaps and loopholes to advance their AI ambitions.
“We ask that you look for ways to strengthen controls on shipments through third countries that pose a high risk of diversion,” the letter to Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Waltz said.
“For example, Singapore represented 22% of Nvidia’s revenue in its most recently quarterly statement, despite the company itself revealing most of these shipments ultimately went to users outside of Singapore.”
DeepSeek’s claim of having developed an ultra-efficient chatbot so cheaply sparked a $1 trillion selloff as investors feared that Nvidia chips were less essential to the AI race than previously thought.
Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang recently asserted that DeepSeek had a supply of advanced Nvidia chips it couldn’t publicly acknowledge due to the export controls.
Representatives for the White House, the FBI and DeepSeek did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Nvidia said in a statement that “we insist that our partners comply with all applicable laws, and if we receive any information to the contrary, act accordingly.”
Nvidia earlier said that DeepSeek had not violated any export controls.
Earlier this week, Howard Lutnick, President Trump’s Commerce Secretary nominee, asserted earlier this week that DeepSeek likely had improper access to Nvidia’s chips.
“Nvidia’s chips, which they bought tons of, and they found their ways around it, drive their DeepSeek model,” Lutnick said Wednesday during his confirmation hearing. “It’s got to end. If they are going to compete with us, let them compete, but stop using our tools to compete with us. So I’m going to be very strong on that.”
In a research paper released last month, DeepSeek said it had trained its V3 model using just 2,048 of Nvidia’s H800 chips.
Nvidia specifically created the less-power H800 for sale to Chinese firms after the Biden administration blocked the sale of more advanced chips.
In October 2023, the Biden administration also blocked the sale of the H800, leading Nvidia to develop another less-powerful version called the H20.
The Trump administration is now considering whether to place export controls on the H20, according to Bloomberg.
Luckey, who leads the AI defense firm Anduril, has been among the most vocal critics of DeepSeek’s claims.
Earlier this week, he blasted DeepSeek for spreading “CCP propaganda” meant to fuel doubt about America’s efforts to develop advanced AI.
“You had a lot of useful idiots in US media kind of just mindlessly reporting that that’s the case, and neither China nor the media nor DeepSeek has any kind of incentive to correct the record as a lot of US companies like Nvidia crashed to the tunes of hundreds of billions of dollars,” Luckey said.
Meanwhile, executives at Meta and Microsoft have confirmed they still plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on computer chips and other AI-related infrastructure in the next few years.
