Several leading Chinese open-weight models show technical fingerprints consistent with training on Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are restricted from export to China, according to research reported by TechCrunch. The analysis covered releases from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group.
Will DePue of the nonprofit Unemployment Labs examined model weights for signs left by the hardware configuration used during training. He reported evidence linking closely watched Kimi K3 and DeepSeek V4 releases to Blackwell chips. US officials have separately alleged that Moonshot used restricted Nvidia hardware, while Epoch AI estimates roughly two million advanced chips entered China through concealed destinations during 2024 and 2025.
The findings do not show that the models trained entirely on restricted chips or prove an export-control violation. The hardware could have been located in an offshore data center. Malaysia has become a major destination for accelerators, with Epoch estimating 275,000 Nvidia AI chips imported there over the same period.
That distinction exposes a policy gap: controls often focus on ownership and shipping destination rather than the remote use of computing capacity. The weight analysis adds evidence that Chinese labs can still reach advanced hardware, but investigators would need supply-chain and data-center records to determine how the chips were obtained and whether any company broke the law.