By Stephen Nellis
Publication Date: 2026-01-28 22:18:00
By Stephen Nellis
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 28 (Reuters) – U.S. chipmaker Nvidia helped China’s DeepSeek hone artificial intelligence models that were later used by the Chinese military, the chairman of a U.S. House of Representatives committee said in a letter seen by Reuters on Wednesday.
DeepSeek shook markets early last year with a set of AI models that rivaled some of the best offerings from the United States but were developed with far less computing power, fuelling concerns in Washington that China could catch up with the U.S. in AI despite U.S. restrictions on the sale of high-powered computing chips to China.
In a letter to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Representative John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on China, said documents obtained by the committee from Nvidia showed the achievement came after extensive technical assistance from Nvidia.
“According to NVIDIA records, NVIDIA technology development personnel helped DeepSeek achieve major training efficiency gains through an ‘optimized co-design of algorithms, frameworks, and hardware,’ with internal reporting boasting that ‘DeepSeek-V3 requires only 2.788M H800 GPU hours for its full training’ – less than what U.S. developers typically require for frontier-scale models,” Moolenaar wrote in the letter.
GPU hours are the number of hours an AI chip must run to train an AI model, while frontier-scale models refer to leading models produced by U.S. firms such…
