DeepSeek reportedly plans 160,000 Huawei AI chips

A Chinese artificial intelligence startup, DeepSeek, is reportedly planning to deploy at least 160,000 of Huawei's Ascend 950DT AI chips in a massive data center under construction in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia. If completed, this project would represent one of the largest known clusters of Huawei AI chips and signifies a significant step in China's effort to reduce its reliance on foreign technology, particularly from NVIDIA. The planned data center is described as being on a gigawatt scale, capable of consuming energy equivalent to powering approximately 750,000 homes. While the Ascend 950DT chips are designed for training artificial intelligence models, DeepSeek intends to use them primarily for inference tasks. The company has continued to utilize NVIDIA hardware for the more demanding training workloads of its models. This strategy aligns with China's broader national initiative to bolster its domestic semiconductor industry and AI capabilities, especially as NVIDIA's most advanced AI accelerators are subject to export restrictions in China.