A senior Trump administration official claims Chinese startup DeepSeek trained its upcoming model on banned Nvidia Blackwell chips, reportedly clustered in an Inner Mongolia data center. Officials also suspect the firm will scrub technical markers of chip usage. The leak further inflames Washington's bitter debate over export control enforcement.
Federal prosecutors just charged four people with running a front company to illegally smuggle Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs into China. The group allegedly bypassed US export controls using falsified shipping manifests and wire transfers from Chinese bank accounts. Why it matters: It offers a rare glimpse into how restricted frontier hardware still finds its way past export bans.
Nvidia just swept all seven categories in the latest MLPerf inference benchmarks, showcasing its new H200 chip and TensorRT-LLM software optimizations. Inference now drives roughly 40% of Nvidia's data center revenue. Intel submitted results for Gaudi2 and 5th Gen Xeon, but AMD once again chose not to submit its MI300.
