Banned Nvidia Blackwell chips may have trained China's strongest open models. On November 13, 2026, TechCrunch reported on a new weight-analysis study: open-weight models released by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group carry traces of training on Blackwell chips — hardware that US export controls were supposed to keep out of China. The study accuses no company of breaking the law, but it adds hard evidence to a two-year argument: the bans controlled who could buy the chips, not necessarily who trained on them.
What the weight analysis actually found
The research was done by Will DePue, a former OpenAI researcher now at the nonprofit Unemployment Labs. Model weights still carry the configuration fingerprints of the chips used to train them, and DePue found clear Blackwell signatures in the most closely watched releases, Moonshot's Kimi K3 series and DeepSeek's V4 series. White House technology adviser Michael Kratsios said earlier this year that Moonshot had used banned Nvidia chips, citing US intelligence. The nonprofit Epoch AI estimates that about two million advanced chips entered China through various channels in 2024 and 2025.
Why the bans failed to stop the training
The boundaries matter: this does not mean the models were trained entirely on Nvidia chips, nor that anyone violated export controls. The chips could have sat in offshore data centers, with Chinese firms training remotely — the backdrop to the data-center boom in places such as Malaysia, where Epoch AI estimates 275,000 Nvidia AI accelerators were imported in 2024 and 2025. The bans were designed to stop Chinese labs from using the most powerful chips, but in practice they controlled who could buy them, not who could use them. Longtime critics argue controls should extend to how chips are used, not just who owns them or where they are installed.
Three things to watch next: whether the US Commerce Department tightens rules on the use of controlled chips; how the investigation into Nvidia and Megaspeed develops — Bloomberg reported this week that a company linked to Alice Huang, the woman at the center of the affair allegations against Jensen Huang, was involved in smuggling banned Nvidia chips to a data center in Shanghai; and whether Chinese firms shift more training to domestic chips. Nvidia's chip sales to China are also under investigation by Democratic lawmakers in the US, and whether controls tighten will decide whether the next generation of Chinese open models can keep following the same path.
