DeepSeek's track record proves that Nvidia's pre-training abilities fill a niche unmatched by domestic Chinese products. Reports in August claimed that Huawei's Ascend GPU servers were unable to run necessary training workloads , prompting a return to Nvidia hardware in the R2 training process. This was despite government intervention and doctrines calling for DeepSeek to turn to domestic Chinese products for its AI workload. While the Huawei Ascend servers were used for inference for the models, the company could not turn anywhere but to Nvidia, much to the chagrin of China.
The Trump administration recently announced plans to unrestrict the Nvidia H200 GPU in China , opening up Nvidia's sales in the country. Speculators claim that this policy U-turn from the White House, which has spent much of 2025 toeing a line of complete export isolationism to China, comes as fears of Huawei's CloudMatrix 384 and Ascend 910C systems grow. Reputable claims hold that these servers match the H200 and GB200 NVL72 in certain performance metrics, causing the U.S. government to release the H200 into China.
This new policy is based on a compromise between flooding China with easy-to-access American Nvidia tech and banning it altogether. The hope is to satiate Chinese tech needs and take away motivation for firms like Huawei to develop their own Nvidia competitors. The adoption of this doctrine, oft-touted by Nvidia's lobbying efforts to the White House, marks a major shift in the "Chip War" trade offensive between Beijing and Washington D.C., which has moved from preventing China from any access to next-gen tech to hoping to slow China's tech power that is beginning to threaten Western tech dominance.
While Trump's Commerce Department continues to insist that China will never see Nvidia Blackwell hardware, keeping the export exceptions limited to Hopper-generation hardware like the H200, time will tell if further Nvidia lobbying and fears of the Chinese tech sector will open the doors further. And of course, if DeepSeek truly is involved in conspiracies of phantom data centers, they won't even need the U.S. to allow them access to Blackwell.
Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News , or add us as a preferred source , to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.
Sunny Grimm Contributing Writer Sunny Grimm is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has been building and breaking computers since 2017, serving as the resident youngster at Tom's. From APUs to RGB, Sunny has a handle on all the latest tech news.
tennis2 Water is wet. Seriously though, when there's a need, people will get creative. Reply
imsurgical Pretty sure GN covered just how much smuggling IS going on over there. But, it's NVIDIA, soo…. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/nvidia-decries-far-fetched-reports-of-smuggling-in-face-of-deepseek-training-reports-unnamed-sources-claim-chinese-company-is-involved-in-blackwell-smuggling-ring#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
- Ride Into Adventure With Capcom’s ‘Monster Hunter Stories’ Series in the Cloud
- Nintendo Switch 2 RAM prices rise 41%, NAND flash up 8% — console giant shares nosedive in face of increased cost warnings
- Intel fails to get EU antitrust ruling overturned in longstanding 16-year AMD competition case — chipmaker sees $1.2 billion fine reduced to $278 million
- Rivian unveils its own in-house RAP1 AI chip and ACM3 self-driving platform—automaker one-ups Tesla with LiDAR support
- Microsoft promises to make Windows 11 the best operating system for gaming — says it will focus on background workloads, power and scheduling, graphics stack, a
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.