Unemployment Labs said on 12 November that six AI models from four Chinese companies show signs of NVIDIA's Blackwell chips. The US restricts exports of these chips to China. The models are DeepSeek-V4-Flash and V4-Pro, Kimi K3 and K3.1-Pro from Moonshot AI, MiniMax-M3, and Ling-3.1-flash from Ant Group. All were released since April 2026. Earlier models from the same companies match NVIDIA's older Hopper chips, the lab said. It used only the published weights, the numbers that shape how a model answers. For DeepSeek-V4-Flash and Kimi K3, it also confirmed the match on real Blackwell chips.
The method shows how a model's starting numbers were made. The lab says that supports, but does not prove, that Blackwell also did the training. Specially set up AMD chips, also export-restricted, are the only other explanation it found. It ruled them out for DeepSeek-V4-Flash and calls them very unlikely for the other five. The report does not say where the chips were, how the companies got access, or whether export rules were broken. It notes that Blackwell systems can be rented from data centers outside China. The lab also says it is not confident in its estimates of how many chips each training run used.
Teams that build on these open models now have a technical claim about their hardware origins to weigh. The report itself does not say any rule was broken. It adds that U.S. officials and press reports had alleged Blackwell use at DeepSeek and Moonshot AI earlier, without publishing technical evidence.