DEEPSEEK, the Chinese startup whose low-cost AI model stunned the world last year, yesterday launched a preview of a highly awaited new model adapted for Huawei chip technology, underlining China’s growing self-sufficiency in the sector.
The Pro version of the new model outperforms other open-source models in world-knowledge benchmarks, trailing only Google’s closed-source Gemini-Pro-3.1, DeepSeek said.
The close collaboration with Huawei on the new model, the V4, contrasts with DeepSeek’s past reliance on Nvidia’s chips.
“This is a big deal for China’s AI industry,” said He Hui, director of semiconductor research at consultancy Omdia.
“Huawei’s Ascend chips are the country’s best homegrown alternative to Nvidia, and supporting DeepSeek V4 shows that top Chinese AI models can now run on Chinese hardware.”
Most leading AI models are trained and run on chips made by Nvidia. Huawei said its chips were used in some of the V4’s training process.
DeepSeek’s pivot underscores concerns raised by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and others that the US firm risks losing its developer ecosystem in China due to US export controls and Beijing’s self-sufficiency push.
“The day that DeepSeek comes out on Huawei first, that is a horrible outcome for our nation,” Huang said in a Dwarkesh Podcast interview this month.
DeepSeek has often been hit with accusations by Washington and US rivals that its success owes much to the improper use of U.S. know-how, and yesterday’s launch comes one day after the White House accused China of stealing US AI labs’ intellectual property on an industrial scale.
It was not clear, however, if the issue is large enough to strain relations ahead of a visit by US President Donald Trump to Beijing next month to meet with China’s leader, Xi Jinping.
For its part, DeepSeek has acknowledged the use of Nvidia chips but has not commented on whether those particular chips were subject to export bans. It has also said it has not intentionally used synthetic data generated by OpenAI.
Washington began to restrict China’s access to advanced AI chips made by US firms in 2022 and since then Beijing has accelerated its push to achieve tech self-sufficiency.
Huawei said it had worked closely with DeepSeek so the new V4 models could run across its full line of high-performance Ascend systems.
Nvidia now faces even more of an uphill battle in regaining market share in China.
The Trump administration in January gave the green light for Nvidia’s powerful H200 chips to be sold in China but sources have said that shipments have been stymied by disagreements over the terms of the sales both in China and the US.
Nvidia’s shares were flat in pre-market trading. Chinese chipmakers rallied on expectations for wider use of homegrown chips, with Huahong Semiconductor and SMIC surging 15 per cent and 10pc respectively.
Many Western and some Asian governments have banned their institutions and officials from using DeepSeek, citing data privacy concerns. Nevertheless, DeepSeek’s models have consistently been among the most used on international platforms that host open-source models.
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