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.