Chinese military attempts to buy NVIDIA GPUs

By analyzing the portal used to request equipment and some documents, Business Insider discovered that the People's Liberation Army of the People's Republic of China wants to purchase NVIDIA GPUs for various projects, including training DeepSeek AI models and developing a robot dog. The California-based company downplayed the issue.

H20, H100 and RTX 6000 chips

NVIDIA GPUs are the most widely used for training artificial intelligence models . This has allowed the company to become a near-monopolist in the market and exceed a market capitalization of $4 trillion. After a ban lasting approximately three months, the Trump administration has reauthorized the sale of H20 GPUs in China.

Business Insider found several requests on the Chinese portal for GPUs to be installed in servers built by DeepSeek. One of them is for eight H20s for a system capable of running DeepSeek's R1 671B model . A second request is for four GeForce RTX 6000 graphics cards. Finally, there are requests for H100 GPUs, the export of which to China has been banned for almost three years.

A request for a Jetson module to be used in a robot dog was also submitted, but was later deleted. It is not known whether any chips have been delivered to the Chinese military. An NVIDIA spokesperson said China has enough domestic chips for all military applications.

Buying a handful of old products to test US competitors isn't a national security issue. Using restricted products for military applications would be a failure, without support, software, or maintenance.

According to Chinese authorities, H20 GPUs contain a geolocation mechanism and remote deactivation technology that functions as a backdoor . NVIDIA has denied this. Some national security experts have called on the U.S. government to block the export of H20 GPUs.