DeepSeek plans major Huawei Ascend chip deployment at Inner Mongolia data center

DeepSeek, the Hangzhou-based AI lab that rattled Silicon Valley earlier this year, is getting ready to swap out a critical piece of its hardware stack. CEO Liang Wenfeng revealed in investor discussions that Huawei will begin delivering AI training chips to DeepSeek around Q4 2026 or Q1 2027. The move signals that Huawei’s homegrown AI accelerators have matured enough to satisfy one of China’s most demanding AI developers, and represents one of the clearest examples yet of Chinese tech firms building an alternative supply chain that routes entirely around US export controls on advanced semiconductors. The hardware play The chip at the center of this transition is Huawei’s Ascend 950DT, a processor that has reportedly shown stable results in testing. DeepSeek is reportedly contemplating a deployment of at least 160,000 of these chips at a new data center in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, with the facility expected to draw roughly 1 gigawatt of power. 160,000 chips dedicated to inference tasks would make this one of the largest known implementations of Huawei’s AI accelerators anywhere. DeepSeek already completed full-parameter post-training of its V4 Pro model using around 1,000 Ascend 91...