Since 2022, the US has progressively expanded the types of chips that cannot be sold to China and the geographical scope of the trade restrictions to cover more countries, in an attempt to slow down China’s application of AI to defence and other strategic industries.

DeepSeek- which is backed by Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer- had said in July 2022 that it owned and operated a cluster of 10,000 A100 Nvidia chips, which are a less advanced version of Nvidia’s AI chips, developed specifically for China. The chips are also compliant with U.S. export restrictions.

Export controls need to be tightened after revelations the Chinese company used Nvidia technology, the leaders of a congressional committee said.