There seems no end to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s ‘China troubles’. Just days after reports that Chinese government has given partial approval to sale of Nvidia 200 chips in the country comes a letter from Representative John Moolenaar to US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick that claims Nvidia helped China’s DeepSeek hone artificial intelligence models that were later used by the Chinese military. Incidentally, DeepSeek is the same Chinse AI startup that shook US stock markets in January 2025, wiping billions of dollars from the market cap of some of the biggest America companies. What set the alarm bells was the claim that DeepSeek AI models 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 letter to the US Commerce Secretary Lutnick, Representative Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on China, said that 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.“In effect, Nvidia’s technical support allowed DeepSeek to extract near-frontier performance from ‘deprecated’ H800 chips, undermining the export-control bottlenecks that US policy was designed to impose,” he wrote. For those unaware, 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 the US companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.“Nvidia treated DeepSeek accordingly – as a legitimate commercial partner deserving of standard technical support,” Moolenaar wrote. Adding further warning, he wrote, “If even the world’s most valuable company cannot rule out the military use of its products when sold to (Chinese) entities, rigorous licensing restrictions and enforcement are essential to prevent such assurances from becoming superficial formalities.” Moolenaar has reportedly requested a briefing from Lutnick by February 13 on the H200 rule enforcement and another recommendation that the Commerce Department use its authority to consider restricting the use of Chinese AI models in the US.

Nvidia slams John Moolenaar’s letter

In a statement, an Nvidia spokesperson said the “administration’s critics are unintentionally promoting the interests of foreign competitors — America should always want its industry to compete for vetted and approved commercial businesses, and thereby protecting national security, creating American jobs, and keeping America’s lead in AI.”“China has more than enough domestic chips for all of its military applications, with millions to spare. Just like it would be nonsensical for the American military to use Chinese technology, it makes no sense for the Chinese military to depend on American technology,” Nvidia statement added.In a statement, Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in the U.S., said: “China has all along opposed moves to overstretch the concept of national security or politicize trade and tech issues. We hope the U.S. can take concrete actions to keep global industrial and supply chains stable.”Earlier this month, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration approved sales of Nvidia’s H200 to China with some restrictions, including that the chips not be sold to entities that assist the Chinese military. The H200 is more powerful than the H800 chips DeepSeek used.