Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
The US House of Representatives China committee has asked Nvidia to explain whether and how Chinese company DeepSeek obtained export-controlled chips to power its artificial intelligence app, which lawmakers say poses a national security threat.
John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the panel, and his Democratic counterpart Raja Krishnamoorthi on Wednesday wrote to Nvidia to obtain information about their sales to China and south-east Asia.
The letter came after the panel released a report that said DeepSeek, which trained its model on Nvidia chips, posed a “profound threat” to US national security.
Moolenaar said DeepSeek was a “weapon in the Chinese Communist party’s arsenal, designed to spy on Americans, steal our technology, and subvert US law”.
The US has in recent years introduced sweeping export controls designed to make it harder for Chinese groups to obtain advanced American technology that could help its military.
Scrutiny from the committee increases pressure on Nvidia over whether its sophisticated chips are being covertly sold to China, which the company has long said it works to avoid.
Moolenaar claimed DeepSeek “exploited US AI models and reportedly used advanced Nvidia chips that should never have ended up in Chinese Communist party hands . . . That’s why we’re sending a letter to Nvidia to demand answers”.
Nvidia on Wednesday pushed back strongly against any suggestion it might be responsible for export-controlled chips falling into the wrong hands, saying it followed the government’s directions on where it can or cannot sell chips “to the letter”.
“The technology industry supports America when it exports to well-known companies worldwide. If the government felt otherwise, it would instruct us,” Nvidia added.
The report came a day after it emerged that the US had imposed export controls on Nvidia selling H20 chips to China, blindsiding the company, which had expected relief from the restrictions. In a regulatory filing, it said the controls would lower its earnings by $5.5bn in the quarter to April 27.
Nvidia relies on a complex network of supply chain partners such as Dell and Supermicro, which package its chips into servers and sell on to customers.
It addressed suggestions in the congressional report that customers in China may be accessing its export-controlled chips via subsidiaries in Singapore, which accounted for 18 per cent of its 2025 fiscal year revenue, or $23.7bn.
Nvidia said the revenue it reports from Singapore was based on billing addresses, meaning it often included subsidiaries of US companies. “The associated products are shipped to other locations, including the United States and Taiwan, not to China,” it said.
The China committee’s report said DeepSeek transmitted data using infrastructure that was connected to China Mobile, a major Chinese telecoms provider that the Pentagon has designated as having connections to the country’s military.
It added DeepSeek also integrated tracking tools from large Chinese tech groups, including ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, in addition to Baidu, a Chinese internet search engine, and Tencent.
“This entangles DeepSeek’s data harvesting architecture with [People’s Republic of China] companies known for their roles in surveillance and CCP control, heightening the risk that foreign adversary entities could gain access to Americans’ private information,” the report said.
DeepSeek could not immediately be reached for comment.
China’s embassy in Washington said the committee’s claims were “groundless” and Beijing opposed the “overstretching of the concept of national security and the politicisation of economic, trade and technological issues”.
“The Chinese government attaches great importance to data privacy and security and protects them in accordance with the law. It has never required, nor will it require, companies or individuals to illegally collect or store data,” said Liu Pengyu, the embassy spokesperson.
DeepSeek sparked a tech market rout earlier this year when it announced breakthroughs that appeared to shift the balance of power in an AI arms race between Washington and Beijing.
In January Nvidia had about $600bn wiped off its market valuation as investors reacted to reports that DeepSeek had trained models that were competitive with the latest offerings from groups such as OpenAI at a fraction of the cost and using far less computing power.
DeepSeek said it trained its “R1” model using clusters of Nvidia’s H800 chips, which are less powerful versions of its H100 chip. The H800 was specifically designed for the Chinese market to comply with US export controls and was later blocked by Joe Biden’s administration in 2023.
Read the full article here
