It was difficult to deny that the successes of the Chinese AI-Startap Deepseek caused in the United States not only the admiration of competitors, but also the concern of officials. Microsoft suspected that the training of the DEPSEEK language models could occur due to illegal access to the Openai data, and the US authorities also suspect that the Chinese company could access NVIDIA accelerators entering sanctions through intermediaries in Singapore.
Image source: NVIDIA
Last year, Singapura managed to avoid a total ban on receiving and transit shipping accelerators of American calculations, but at the beginning of this year, the Biden administration managed to limit such supplies through the introduction of quotas. Without the US export license in Singapore, you can put no more than 1,700 NVIDIA accelerators, but even such a party will require notifications of the American authorities. They can simply block a larger batch.
NVIDIA registers in Singapore up to 20 % of all revenue, but explains that it actually supplies in a tiny state much less products than one might think. Through Singapore companies, the NVIDIA is simply paid for the supply of NVIDIA products, and in fact, shipment is carried out in many other countries, including Western ones.
It is believed that Deepseek for teaching its V3 model, presented last month, used 2048 NVIDIA accelerators of the H800 series. Their deliveries to China were banned since the end of 2023, but it is difficult to establish how Deepseek gained access to these accelerators. Now, according to Bloomberg, American officials suggest that Chinese developers used intermediaries in Singapore to obtain computing accelerators prohibited for importing into China directly. Nvidia hastened to say that she controls the supply of accelerators and adheres to export restrictions imposed by the United States.
As it became known recently, the new US administration wants to include NVIDIA H20 accelerators, which can so far be entered into China legally, into an expanded list of export control. The potential US Minister of Trade, Howard Lutnick, said that he did not intend to encourage the use of the Chinese side of “American instruments” for rivalry in the field of artificial intelligence. According to him, China’s access to certain categories of accelerators of computing American origin must be blocked.