DeepSeek reportedly blocked Nvidia and AMD from early access to V4, giving Chinese suppliers a head start

According to sources speaking to Reuters, Chinese AI company DeepSeek has denied Nvidia and AMD early access to its upcoming V4 model update – the same company that rattled the US AI market last year with its unexpectedly capable language models.

Early access to V4 was reportedly granted exclusively to domestic Chinese suppliers, including Huawei. If confirmed, that would give Chinese chipmakers several weeks to optimize their processors for the new model while US competitors are left waiting on the sidelines – a clear break from standard industry practice.

This comes amid renewed tension over US-China semiconductor export controls. An unnamed "senior Trump administration official" claimed that V4 was trained on a cluster of Nvidia Blackwell chips housed in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China. That would directly contradict current US policy, which the same source summed up as: "We're not shipping Blackwells to China."

Washington has approved the sale of older H200 chips to Chinese buyers, but the newer and far more powerful Blackwell architecture remains off-limits. Trump has repeatedly said Blackwell hardware won't be sold to Chinese customers for the foreseeable future – though reports of chip smuggling suggest a number of them have already crossed the border.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last year that China is only "nanoseconds behind" the US in AI and chip development, and has long pushed for Nvidia to be allowed to sell its products to Chinese customers.

Some analysts now view DeepSeek's move as part of a broader Chinese government strategy to keep the US playing catch-up. Given DeepSeek's track record with earlier models, handing domestic manufacturers an early advantage on new AI systems looks like another calculated step in that direction – assuming Reuters' sources have it right.