The Information reports DeepSeek and Huawei are collaborating on future AI chip designs to challenge Nvidia
DEEPSEEK AND HUAWEI ARE COLLABORATING ON NEW AI CHIP DESIGNS TO CHALLENGE NVIDIA - THE IN FORMATION
Context
DeepSeek helping shape Huawei's chips would deepen China's push for a homegrown AI hardware stack, reducing reliance on Nvidia for training frontier models.
This is a secondhand headline from Walter Bloomberg, a news headline account, relaying a paywalled report from The Information that cites unnamed sources. Neither DeepSeek nor Huawei is quoted confirming the chip design work, though DeepSeek announced a software partnership with Huawei in September.
Deep dive
On October 19, the headline account Walter Bloomberg posted that DeepSeek and Huawei are collaborating on new AI chip designs to challenge Nvidia, citing The Information.
The Information's article, by Qianer Liu and Juro Osawa, is paywalled. Techmeme's summary of it says, citing sources, that the two companies are collaborating on future AI chip designs, and that DeepSeek plans to start using Huawei's Ascend 950DT for pretraining as soon as the end of 2026.
The report builds on a relationship that is already public. On September 30, Reuters reported that DeepSeek said it had partnered with Huawei to develop programming tools optimized for Huawei's Ascend chips, that it was open sourcing programming infrastructure for the Ascend platform, and that the two had jointly advanced a supernode system based on 128 Ascend 950 chips.
According to an earlier Reuters summary of Huawei's roadmap, the Ascend 950DT is the version of the 950 meant for model training and the decode stage of inference, and Huawei plans further Ascend 960 and 970 series in later years.
The post itself adds no detail beyond the headline, and what the collaboration on chip designs involves is not described in the public summaries.
What to expect next
Watch whether DeepSeek or Huawei confirm the chip design work, and whether DeepSeek's next model is actually pretrained on Ascend 950DT chips, which would be the clearest sign that Chinese labs can train frontier models without Nvidia. Also watch Huawei's production volumes for the 950 series and any new US export rules aimed at the partnership. Investors will read any confirmation as pressure on Nvidia's China business.