Nvidia says China’s DeepSeek is not using its Blackwell chips: ‘We pursue any…’

Nvidia has refuted a report which claimed that the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek is utilising smuggled Blackwell chips to develop its upcoming AI model. DeepSeek drew attention in January this year when it launched the R1 AI model which, the company claimed, was trained at a fraction of the cost of comparable US-made models.

“We haven’t seen any substantiation or received tips of ‘phantom datacenters’ constructed to deceive us and our OEM partners, then deconstructed, smuggled, and reconstructed somewhere else,” an Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement, as per CNBC.