(Bloomberg) – Nvidia Corp. provided technical support that helped DeepSeek improve its breakthrough artificial intelligence model despite US export controls designed to restrict the Chinese startup’s access to high-end American chips, according to the Republican head of the House China committee.
DeepSeek achieved cutting-edge performance with its R1 model thanks to what Nvidia called “an optimized co-design of algorithms, frameworks and hardware” for using its H800 processors, Representative John Moolenaar wrote in a letter Wednesday to US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Nvidia also proposed offering DeepSeek as an enterprise-ready product to be deployed on its hardware, Moolenaar wrote, citing records obtained from the chipmaker.
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(Bloomberg) – Nvidia Corp. provided technical support that helped DeepSeek improve its breakthrough artificial intelligence model despite US export controls designed to restrict the Chinese startup’s access to high-end American chips, according to the Republican head of the House China committee.
DeepSeek achieved cutting-edge performance with its R1 model thanks to what Nvidia called “an optimized co-design of algorithms, frameworks and hardware” for using its H800 processors, Representative John Moolenaar wrote in a letter Wednesday to US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Nvidia also proposed offering DeepSeek as an enterprise-ready product to be deployed on its hardware, Moolenaar wrote, citing records obtained from the chipmaker.
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“In effect, Nvidia’s technical support allowed DeepSeek to extract near-frontier performance from ‘deprecated’ H800 chips, undermining the export-control bottlenecks that US policy was designed to impose,” he wrote. Nvidia’s internal reporting shows that DeepSeek-V3 requires only 2.8 million H800 GPU hours for its full training, according to the letter.
Nvidia created the H800 as a hobbled version of its H100 chip in 2023 to comply with existing export control rules, and the processor was allowed to be sold to Chinese customers until October of that year. The letter offers more detail on the extent to which Nvidia was actively working to help DeepSeek design the best model possible in the face of semiconductor constraints.
The records obtained by the committee included communications between Nvidia and DeepSeek from June 2024 to May 2025.
Moolenaar said Nvidia’s collaboration with DeepSeek should spur tough enforcement of US conditions for allowing shipments of the company’s H200s to China following President Donald Trump’s decision in December to ease restrictions on some AI chip sales to the world’s second-largest economy. The Commerce Department has since spelled out terms for winning approval for H200 sales licenses, including a requirement for rigorous procedures to prevent unauthorized use of the technology.
In a statement, an Nvidia spokesperson said the “administration’s critics are unintentionally promoting the interests of foreign competitors — America should always want its industry to compete for vetted and approved commercial businesses, and thereby protecting national security, creating American jobs, and keeping America’s lead in AI.”