DeepSeek has reportedly denied Nvidia and AMD early access to its new V4 AI model, giving Huawei and other Chinese chipmakers a head start
Sources speaking to Reuters have claimed that DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company that gave the US AI market a scare last year with its surprisingly-competitive AI models, has withheld both Nvidia and AMD from early access to its upcoming V4 update.
However, early access is said to have been granted to domestic suppliers, including Huawei. If true, this would be a break from standard industry practices, allowing Chinese chipmakers several weeks to optimise their processors for the new model while their US competitors are left twiddling their thumbs.
All this comes off the back of fresh concerns over US/China chip export controls. An unnamed "senior Trump administration official" has claimed that the V4 model was trained on a cluster of Nvidia Blackwell chips located in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China.
This would be in breach of current US policy on the matter, which the source confirmed was: "We're not shipping Blackwells to China."
While the US government has approved sale of Nvidia's older H200 chips to the country, its newer and much more powerful Blackwell chips appear to be an absolute sticking point.
President Trump has repeatedly confirmed that Nvidia's Blackwell hardware would not sold to Chinese customers at any time in the foreseeable future—although reports of chip smuggling efforts suggest that many have made it to the country already.
Last year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang claimed that China was "nanoseconds behind" the US in terms of AI technology and chipmaking, and has long argued that the company should be allowed to sell its chips to Chinese customers.
And while H200 GPUs now appear to have been approved on both sides of the border, and Chinese buyers are lining up to get their hands on Nvidia's tech, it seems the adversarial relationship between the two nations in regards to the AI race continues.
The US has played its cards in regards to holding back certain AI hardware advances via export controls, but some analysts have suggested that DeepSeek's recent move may be part of a broader strategy by the Chinese government to keep the US on the backfoot.
Given the success of DeepSeek's earlier efforts—and assuming Reuters' sources are correct—providing Chinese firms with an extra, early advantage towards its new AI models strikes as the most recent attempt to even the odds.