NVIDIA Helped China Circumvent US Sanctions on Chip Supplies for AI Development

The US House of Representatives Select Committee on the CCP has accused NVIDIA of providing critical technical support to the Chinese company DeepSeek. This cooperation allowed Beijing to circumvent US export restrictions.

In a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, committee chairman John Moolenaar noted that the American tech giant’s cooperation with Chinese developers directly enhanced the capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the field of artificial intelligence.

According to documents obtained by the committee, NVIDIA engineers helped DeepSeek conduct “optimized joint design of algorithms and hardware,” which allowed it to achieve the performance of advanced models using only H800 chips, which are subject to sanctions.

Internal reports indicate that thanks to this optimization, training the DeepSeek-V3 model required significantly fewer resources than Western developers typically need for models of this class.

The committee emphasizes that such actions effectively nullified the goal of US export control policy, which was to create “bottlenecks” for the development of Chinese AI.

NVIDIA not only provided technical support, but also planned to integrate DeepSeek into its ecosystem as a ready-made product for enterprises, which would further simplify the scaling of Chinese technologies.

The situation is complicated by the fact that DeepSeek’s developments are already integrated into the systems of the Chinese army and state security agencies. The company’s models are used in military hospitals, defense planning units, and PLA command systems.

A study by CrowdStrike also showed that the DeepSeek R1 model deliberately generates vulnerable code when users enter queries that the Chinese Communist Party considers politically sensitive. The probability of obtaining code with critical security holes in such cases increases by 50%.

Despite these facts, NVIDIA continued to view DeepSeek as a normal civilian partner, ignoring China’s military-civil fusion strategy, which makes it impossible to distinguish between commercial and military industries in the PRC.

The committee chair emphasized that even the world’s largest company cannot guarantee that its products will not be used against US national security interests.

In this regard, Congress is demanding that the Department of Commerce immediately strengthen enforcement of the H200 rule, which prohibits the export of chips if they can be used for military purposes, as well as introduce new restrictions on the use of Chinese-origin AI models in the US.

The committee expects a report on the measures taken by February 13, 2026.