On April 18, according to Tom's Hardware, the U.S. House of Representatives' China Special Committee sent a formal letter to AI chip giant Nvidia this week, requesting Nvidia to provide extensive transaction records in response to external doubts that its AI GPU entered the Chinese AI large model manufacturer DeepSeek through Singapore's violations.

In early February this year, as the AI ​​model R1 of Chinese artificial intelligence model developer DeepSeek showed comparable performance to the leading OpenAI O1, the United States began to worry that DeepSeek would pose a threat to its artificial intelligence leadership and launched an investigation into it. According to a previous report by Bloomberg, the U.S. government is investigating whether DeepSeek used an intermediary in Singapore to bypass U.S. export restrictions to purchase Nvidia AI GPU chips that are banned from China.

Although DeepSeek has revealed that it used a limited number of legally acquired H800 GPUs (2048 GPUs) to complete the training of its V3 model using 671 billion parameters and 2.8 million GPU hours in just two months. In comparison, Meta trained its 405 billion-parameter Llama 3 model with 11x more computing resources (30.8 million GPU hours) in 54 days using a supercomputer with 16,384 H100 GPUs.

However, according to SemiAnalysis, a semiconductor research organization, DeepSeek has stockpiled 60,000 NVIDIA GPU cards, including 10,000 A100, 10,000 H100, 10,000 "special edition" H800, and 30,000 "special edition" H20. The total cost of ownership (TCO) of computing power capital expenditure exceeds 14 billion yuan, reaching 1.996 billion US dollars (approximately RMB 14.345 billion). DeepSeek's total server capital expenditures are approximately $1.629 billion, and the cost of operating such a cluster is up to $944 million, so the overall cost could be as high as $2.573 billion.

Although the H800 and H20 GPUs are compliant products designed by Nvidia for the Chinese market after the United States implemented export restrictions on advanced GPUs in 2022 and 2023, other GPUs have been banned from sale in China (the H800 was also banned about a year after its launch). Therefore, the above analysis data has led to speculation that DeepSeek relies on a large number of Nvidia AI GPUs, such as A100 and H100, that are banned in China and obtained through non-compliant channels from Singapore.

According to NVIDIA's financial report, after the United States implemented AI chip export controls to China, NVIDIA's shipments to Singapore increased sharply from 5% in the middle of fiscal year 2023 to 18% in fiscal year 2025 (as of January 2025). Among them, in the third fiscal quarter of fiscal year 2025, Singapore accounted for as much as 22% of Nvidia's total revenue.

As a result, the U.S. Congress has called for an investigation into whether DeepSeek obtained restricted Nvidia AI GPUs through a third-party company in Singapore.

However, Nvidia insists it complies with all legal requirements. Nvidia clarified that "increased revenue related to Singapore does not imply a transfer to China," an Nvidia statement read. "Our public filings report that our customer origins are based on 'billing address' rather than 'shipping address'. Many of our customers have business entities in Singapore and use these entities to sell products destined for the United States and the West. We insist that our partners comply with all applicable laws and act accordingly if we receive any information to the contrary."

In response to the latest inquiry from the House of Representatives, Nvidia responded again through a statement, saying, "Our reported revenue in Singapore only indicates the billing address, which is usually a subsidiary of our U.S. customer. The related products are shipped to other locations, mainly including the United States and Taiwan, not mainland China."

Although Singaporean authorities arrested multiple people earlier this year, including a Chinese citizen, for participating in the illegal smuggling of Nvidia GPUs. However, there is currently no conclusive evidence that these smuggled NVIDIA GPUs were eventually sent to mainland China.