Nvidia says DeepSeek advances prove need for more of its chips
Nvidia on Monday said Chinese AI firm DeepSeek's advances show the usefulness of its chips for the Chinese market and that more of its chips will be needed in the future to meet demand for DeepSeek's services. Nvidia issued a statement on Monday after its shares tumbled 17% to $118.58 on investor concerns that DeepSeek had matched rivals such as OpenAI using far fewer Nvidia chips than U.S. firms. Nvidia rival Advanced Micro Devices' shares also slid more than 6% to $115.01.
«DeepSeek's work illustrates how new models can be created using that technique, leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant,» Nvidia said in its statement. One of DeepSeek's research papers showed that it had used about 2,000 of Nvidia's H800 chips, which were designed to comply with U.S. export controls released in 2022, rules that experts told Reuters would barely slow China's AI progress.
The U.S. microchip export controls were designed to freeze China's development of supercomputers used to develop nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence systems.
Jimmy Goodrich, a senior adviser to the RAND Corp for technology analysis, said there are at least a dozen major supercomputers in China with significant numbers of Nvidia chips that were legal for purchase at the time that DeepSeek used them to learn how to become more efficient. Computing efficiency has also been a major focus of U.S. AI firms.
«DeepSeek didn't come out of nowhere — they've been at model-building for years,» Goodrich said. «It's
