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The U.S. House China Committee asked NVIDIA to explain whether and how Chinese company Deepseek has acquired an export-controlled chip to power artificial intelligence apps.
The panel’s Republican Chairman John Mourenar and his Democratic counterpart Raja Krishnamoorti wrote to Nvidia on Wednesday to obtain information on sales to China and Southeast Asia.
The letter comes after the panel issued a report that Deepseek, who trained the model with Nvidia chips, posed a “deep threat” to US national security.
Moolenaar said Deepseek was “a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party’s weapons and was designed to spy on Americans, steal technology and overturn US laws.”
In recent years, the US has introduced swept export controls designed to make it difficult for Chinese groups to acquire advanced American technology that can help military purposes.
Scrutiny from the committee has raised pressure on Nvidia over whether sophisticated chips are being secretly sold to China, and the company has been working to avoid them for a long time.
Moolenaar reportedly Deepseek “is using advanced Nvidia chips that should not be overtaken at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. So we’re sending a letter to Nvidia to request an answer.”
Nvidia on Wednesday pushed back against suggestions that may be responsible for export control chips falling into the wrong hands, following government instructions on where chips can or cannot be sold “in letters.”
“The technology industry supports America when exporting to well-known companies around the world. If the government feels that it’s not, it will guide us,” Nvidia added.
The report comes the day after it was revealed that the US is imposing export controls on NVIDIA, which sells H20 chips to China. In a regulatory filing, Control said it would cut revenues by April 27 by $5.5 billion.
Nvidia relies on a complex network of supply chain partners such as Dell and Supermicro to package chips into servers and sell them to customers.
The parliamentary report addressed the proposal that Chinese customers may have access to export control chips through their Singapore subsidiary. This accounted for 18% of its revenue for 2025, or $23.7 billion.
Nvidia said the revenue reported from Singapore is based on the billing address. This means that it often includes subsidiaries of US companies. “Related products will be shipped elsewhere, including the US and Taiwan, not China.”
According to a report by the China Commission, Deepseek used infrastructure connected to China Mobile, a Chinese telecommunications provider designated by the Pentagon as having ties to the country’s military.
In addition to Baidu, the Chinese internet search engine, DeepSeek has integrated tracking tools from large Chinese tech groups, including Bytedance, Bytedance, Tiktok owner, Tictok owner, Tencent.
“This entangles Deepseek’s data harvesting construction with companies (People’s Republic of China) known for their role in surveillance and CCP management, increasing the risk that foreign hostile agencies have access to American personal information,” the report states.
Deepseek could not be immediately contacted for comment.
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The Chinese Embassy in Washington said the committee’s claims were “basically unfounded” and that Beijing opposed “an overgrowth in the concept of national security and the politicization of economic, trade and technology issues.”
“The Chinese government places great importance on data privacy and security and protects it according to the law. Businesses and individuals do not need to illegally collect or store data.
Deepseek caused a tech market defeat earlier this year when it announced a breakthrough that appears to change the balance of power in the AI arms race between Washington and Beijing.
In January, Nvidia wiped out a market valuation of around $600 million as Deepseek responded to reports that it would compete with the latest products and competitive models from groups such as Openai at a fraction of the cost, using computing power.
Deepseek said it trained the “R1” model using a cluster of Nvidia’s H800 chips. This is not a powerful version of the H100 chip. The H800 was specifically designed to comply with US export controls for the Chinese market and was blocked in 2023 by the Joe Biden administration.
