Are these chips that are now banned but we're previously available? If so, doesn't this basically mean nothing? They could just be using chips that they bought when they were allowed to buy them.

Afaik, data center grade blackwell chips have never been legal for export to china. I think this has more do to with NVIDIA than DeepSeek. For a brief moment, people thought DeepSeek had found some way to produce AI without sending boatloads of cash to NVIDIA, causing a drop in share price.

Shortly thereafter people realized they were probably just evading sanctions and ~stealing~ bootstrapping parameters from other models to reach their stated training cost. This report is just further reporting on that rumor.