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The answer is, of course lol? Gamers Nexus did a whole deep dive which basically proved that Chinese researchers had access to whatever they wanted. https://y

• simonw 7mo ago
  Some of the big LLM labs have written about their training hardware. DeepSeek v3 was trained on 2,048 NVIDIA H800s. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19437 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19437 MiniMax M1 used 512 H800s. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13585 https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13585 The H800 wasn't banned in the first round of export controls - but was after October 2023: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/17/us-bans-export-of-more-ai-chips-including-nvidia-h800-to-china.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/17/us-bans-export-of-more-ai-ch... Z.ai say they used Huawei hardware: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/15/zhipu_glm_image_huawei_hardware/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/15/zhipu_glm_image_huawe... Qwen and Kimi haven't disclosed their hardware as far as I can tell.
  • tyre 7mo ago
    If they were using banned chips they wouldn't declare them in public papers. There have been multiple documented/alleged cases of chips being routed through Singaporean shell companies. For example: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/singapore-company-alleged-to-have-helped-china-get-usd2-billion-worth-of-nvidia-ai-processors-report-claims-nvidia-denies-that-the-accused-has-any-china-ties-but-a-u-s-investigation-is-underway https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...