The U.S. Commerce Department is looking into whether DeepSeek - the Chinese company whose AI model's performance rocked the tech world - has been using U.S. chips that are not allowed to be shipped to China,

For a slew of AI chip companies chomping to dethrone Nvidia, DeepSeek is the opening they’ve been waiting for.

Organised AI chip smuggling to China has been tracked out of countries including Malaysia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, the source said. The Commerce Department and DeepSeek did not immediately return requests for comment.