DeepSeek and Huawei take aim at Nvidia’s software moat

Nvidia’s biggest advantage in AI has never been only about chips. It has also been about the software developers use to program them. On September 30, 2026, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek and Huawei Technologies went after that software layer directly. They unveiled a suite of open-source programming tools built specifically for Huawei’s Ascend AI chips. Bloomberg reports that the pair are chipping away at Nvidia’s competitive edge. The centerpiece is TileLang, a high-level programming language pitched as a simpler alternative to Nvidia’s CUDA framework. What DeepSeek and Huawei actually released The software package includes six modules. Together they cover compute, communication and programming capabilities for Ascend hardware. TileLang is designed to make development easier than it is with CUDA. It is also built to extract full performance from the underlying hardware. The hardware commitment behind the software is substantial. DeepSeek is preparing to deploy at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips in a new data center in Inner Mongolia. The Ascend 950DT is set to launch in Q4 2026. The research also indicates the chips will be partially online by late 2027 or early 2028. DeepSe...