DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng plans early adaptation to Huawei AI chips

DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that rattled Silicon Valley earlier this year with its efficiency claims, is making its most aggressive move yet toward cutting the Nvidia cord. CEO Liang Wenfeng has laid out a strategy to adapt Huawei’s Ascend AI chips for full-scale model training, a significant escalation from using domestic hardware only for lighter tasks like inference. The plan involves deploying at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips at a new data center in Inner Mongolia, with initial chip deliveries expected between Q4 2026 and Q1 2027. Liang has described the transition as a crucial bet for DeepSeek’s future, one that could reshape how China’s AI ecosystem sources its most critical resource. The numbers tell the story Liang has been unusually candid about the performance gap. By his own estimates, achieving frontier-scale training would require roughly 50,000 Nvidia GB300 chips. The Huawei equivalent? About 200,000 Ascend 950 chips. That’s a 4-to-1 ratio. DeepSeek plans to train a 2-trillion-parameter model using the Huawei hardware, with eventual aims to scale up to 8 trillion parameters. Huawei’s next-generation Ascend 960DT training chip is reportedly on track for ...