But after years of Washington’s preventing Chinese companies from buying certain advanced technology products, firms like DeepSeek and Moonshot AI are starting to design their A.I. systems around the constraints rather than waiting for them to disappear. That includes exploring how their models can run on a broader range of processors beyond Nvidia’s.

“U.S. export controls are not freezing China’s A.I. development,” said Wei Sun, a principal A.I. analyst at Counterpoint Research in Beijing. “They are forcing China to build an alternative stack.”