Researcher says six Chinese models show Blackwell chip traces

The method reads a model’s starting values. Each GPU family has its own number of processing cores, and that count decides how the job of filling a model’s billions of weights with random starting numbers gets shared out, so the layout left behind identifies the family. By the report’s reading, DeepSeek-V4-Flash and MiniMax-M3 were set up on Blackwell B200 or B300 chips, and four others, Kimi K3 among them, on the GB200 or GB300.

DePue says senior researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic have checked his findings, The Decoder reports. TechCrunch ties the findings to the week’s turmoil at Nvidia, reporting that Jensen Huang left after admitting an affair with an executive of Megaspeed, a company TechCrunch describes as implicated in smuggling Nvidia chips into China. The report itself says the weights cannot show who owned the chips or where they sat, since Blackwell systems can be rented outside China, and do not by themselves establish any smuggling.

MiniMax also makes Hailuo, the video app on our sheet. A six-second 768P clip costs about $0.37 on Hailuo’s $14.99 Standard plan (checked 13 November 2026), and MiniMax’s H3 video model costs $0.08 a second at 768P on its API (read 2 October 2026, our prices).

For a Hailuo buyer, the report concerns MiniMax’s M3 language model, a separate product from the video plans priced on our sheet.