Banned Nvidia chips found in 6 Chinese models

Six new Chinese AI models were built on Nvidia Blackwell chips, a former OpenAI researcher said on the 12th of November 2026. The US bars those chips from export to China.

Will DePue shared the finding on X. His post had about 6.3 million views by the 14th of November.

How the test works

Every AI model starts as billions of random numbers, called weights. The chip that sets them up leaves a faint pattern, DePue said.

Older Hopper chips use 132 compute cores, The Decoder reported. Blackwell chips use 148 or 152, and each count leaves a different trace.

Which models

DePue named models from DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax and Ant Group, TechCrunch reported. They include Kimi K3 and DeepSeek V4 Pro.

His method matched the known chips in all 24 test models where labs had named their hardware, DePue wrote on X.

Below we break down the cost

DePue estimates Kimi K3 used about 4,500 Blackwell chips and DeepSeek V4 Pro about 3,000, The Decoder reported. At about 70,000 dollars a chip, that is 525 million dollars, by our arithmetic.

What is confirmed and what is not

The pattern shows which chips set up each model, The Decoder reported. It does not show where the chips were or who owned them.

Chinese firms can rent computers abroad, in places such as Malaysia, TechCrunch reported. One critic on X said the work proves nothing of political weight.

DePue said senior researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic checked his method. The four Chinese firms had not answered in the reports we read.

Key facts

Will DePue says 6 Chinese models show Blackwell chip patterns.

Blackwell chips are barred from export to China.

His test matched known hardware in 24 of 24 control models.

The finding does not show where the chips were located.