DeepSeek plans to train its V5 model on Huawei Ascend 950 chips

The Chinese AI lab is reportedly lining up at least 160,000 Huawei accelerators as it moves toward homegrown hardware DeepSeek plans to train its V5 model on Huawei’s Ascend 950 chips next year. That is a big step for a Chinese AI lab that has reportedly leaned on Nvidia hardware for its most demanding work. What DeepSeek is reportedly building The plan centers on a new data center in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia. DeepSeek reportedly intends to deploy at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips at the site. That fleet was initially meant for inference, according to the reports. Inference is the work of answering user prompts with a model that has already been built. The more ambitious shift is toward pre-training. That is the long, compute-hungry stage where a model learns from enormous amounts of data. DeepSeek reportedly aims to start pre-training workloads on the Ascend 950DT as soon as late 2026. Equipment failures are exactly what tripped up earlier efforts. DeepSeek has reportedly struggled to train models on prior-generation Ascend chips because of stability and performance issues. To avoid a repeat, Huawei engineers have reportedly embedded with DeepSeek’s team. The goal is to sh...