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.
