China North Industries Corporation, or Norinco, a state-owned defense firm, earlier this year unveiled the P60, an autonomous military vehicle that can travel at 50 kilometers per hour (approximately 31 miles per hour) and features autonomous combat-support capability. According to Reuters, the drone is powered by DeepSeek, but details about it remain a state secret. However, the publication dived deep into procurement records and patents, which suggest the continued use of Nvidia AI GPUs by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the various institutions that support it.
The U.S. has restricted the export of its most advanced AI chips to China since 2022, only allowing Nvidia and AMD to ship versions that are significantly less performant than their top-of-the-line models. Despite that, there’s reportedly still a healthy black market for chips like the Nvidia H100, which, although prohibited from export to China in the U.S., isn’t illegal to obtain in the East Asian nation. Still, Beijing is pushing for its own homegrown chips, and it has even banned some of its biggest tech companies from acquiring them, saying that the performance of domestic semiconductors can already match Nvidia’s H20 and RTX Pro 6000D AI GPUs.
Chinese military use of Nvidia tech
Despite Beijing's recent ban, 35 of the patents that Reuters discovered, most of them filed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and other educational institutions that conduct research for the Chinese military, mentioned the use of Nvidia’s A100 chips. One patent was filed as late as June of this year, although it’s unknown whether the AI GPUs used in it were acquired before or after Washington's export controls.
On the other hand, a further 15 patents noted the use of Huawei Ascend chips, showing China’s progress in making its own AI GPUs. DeepSeek, the AI tool used in Norinco’s vehicle, was also suspected to have been trained on Nvidia AI GPUs, although the company’s latest model now supports Huawei’s chips and its CANN software toolkit.
The report says that the PLA "and affiliates continue to use and look for Nvidia chips," including models currently under Washington export controls. "China has more than enough domestic chips for all of its military applications, with millions to spare," Nvidia told Tom's Hardware in a statement. "While we can't track individual resales of products sold years ago, recycling small quantities of old, second-hand products doesn't enable anything new or raise any national security concern. Using restricted products for military applications would be a nonstarter, without support, software, or maintenance."
Weaponized AI
China isn’t the first country to experiment with and employ AI for its military. In fact, a U.S. defense startup is already working on an AI-powered drone killer, Sweden is experimenting with an AI drone swarm, and Russia is allegedly field-testing an AI-powered drone. AI technologies will allow warfare to become more efficient, with Chinese researchers saying that planning and assessment, which often takes 48 hours by a team of military planners, can now be completed in a matter of seconds.
Despite that, its top leaders say that humans will maintain control of its weapons systems, especially as we cannot say with 100% accuracy how reliable these systems could be. We’ve seen this countless times in Hollywood movies, and even in one USAF test, in which the simulated AI drone turned on its human operator to accomplish its mission regardless of the consequences.
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