A member of the U.S. House of Representatives stated in a letter to the Secretary of Commerce,American chip giant Nvidia once provided technical support to Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek to help it optimize the training efficiency of artificial intelligence models, and these models were subsequently used by the Chinese military.The accusation further intensifies Washington's concerns that high-performance U.S. chips and technology may indirectly flow to China's military sector in the context of export controls.
The letter was sent by Rep. John Mullenar, Republican of Michigan, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives' Special Committee on China. He stated in the letter that internal documents obtained by the committee from NVIDIA showed that a series of artificial intelligence models launched by DeepSeek last year had performance comparable to top American products at a much lower computing power investment than similar "cutting-edge models" in the United States. This achievement is closely related to the large amount of technical assistance provided by NVIDIA.
In the letter, Molenaar quoted NVIDIA's internal report as saying that NVIDIA technology developers and DeepSeek conducted "collaborative optimization design of algorithms, frameworks and hardware," which significantly improved the efficiency of DeepSeek model training. The report mentioned that the DeepSeek‑V3 model only requires about 2.788 million hours of H800 graphics processing chip computing time to complete full training, which is lower than the computing power usually consumed by American developers when training cutting-edge models of the same level.
DeepSeek shocked the capital market with its related models early last year. Because it has achieved high-performance breakthroughs with relatively limited investment in computing power, Washington has become increasingly worried that, despite U.S. measures to restrict the export of high-end computing chips to China, China may still quickly approach or even narrow the gap with the United States in the field of artificial intelligence.
The report pointed out that Nvidia’s provision of the above support to DeepSeek can be traced back to 2024. At that time, there was no public indication that DeepSeek’s technology had been or would soon be adopted by the Chinese military. Mullenar wrote in the letter that Nvidia "regarded DeepSeek as a legitimate business partner and provided it with standard technical support services."
Nvidia's H800 chip is a product specially designed for the Chinese market. It has been sold to China normally until it is included in the export control list by the United States in 2023. Previous reports stated that U.S. officials believe that DeepSeek is assisting the Chinese military and is still trying to obtain relevant technical support or hardware resources despite export control measures.
In the face of doubts, Nvidia stated in a statement that China's domestic chip stock is sufficient to meet all its military application needs, and "there are still millions of surplus chips." It emphasized that logically, just as the U.S. military will not rely on Chinese technology, the Chinese military is unlikely to rely on U.S. technology. Nvidia's statement aims to downplay the direct connection between its products and China's military use.
Liu Pengyu, spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in the United States, responded that China has always opposed the generalization of national security concepts and the politicization of economic, trade and technological issues, and expressed the hope that the United States will take concrete actions to maintain the stability of global industrial and supply chains. The U.S. Department of Commerce has yet to publicly respond to the matter. DeepSeek also did not respond to interview requests outside of local business hours in China.
In the broader policy context, the Trump administration earlier this month approved exports of newer-generation Nvidia H200 chips to China under certain restrictions, provided they are not sold to entities deemed to be assisting the Chinese military. The H200 chip is considered to be more powerful than the H800 previously used by DeepSeek. This decision immediately attracted criticism from China hardliners in US political circles, who believed that related exports may "accelerate Beijing's military power" and weaken the United States' advantage in the field of artificial intelligence.
Mullenar pointed out in the letter that if even "the world's most valuable company" cannot rule out the possibility of its products being used by the military in sales to China, then strict licensing mechanisms and law enforcement are crucial, otherwise the company's various guarantees on compliance will become "superficial." He also warned that as long as U.S. chips continue to be open to China's "ostensibly non-military" end users, it will eventually be difficult to avoid violating restrictions on "military terminals."