Key facts
- DeepSeek plans to install at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT AI chips in a new data center.
- The data center is located in Inner Mongolia, China.
- The deployment aims to reduce China's reliance on Nvidia's AI accelerators.
- Huawei's production capacity for the Ascend 950DT chips is limited by component shortages.
- The Inner Mongolia facility is part of China's 'Eastern Data, Western Compute' strategy.
AI startup DeepSeek is reportedly planning a significant order of Huawei Technologies Co.'s Ascend 950DT artificial intelligence chips for a new data center it is building in Inner Mongolia. The facility is expected to house at least 160,000 of Huawei's top accelerators, a move that could establish one of the largest known clusters of Chinese-made AI chips and advance Beijing's goal of reducing reliance on U.S. technology like Nvidia's.
The timeline for the deployment is contingent on Huawei's production capabilities, which are currently constrained by component shortages, particularly high-end memory. This could mean that fulfilling DeepSeek's order might take over a year. While Huawei designed the Ascend 950DT for demanding tasks like training AI models, DeepSeek currently intends to use them primarily for operating its models, having relied on Nvidia chips for crucial training phases of its previous models.
This development is seen as a critical step in China's technological competition with the U.S., as American policymakers have imposed restrictions on companies like Huawei to curb its progress in AI chip development. Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, has expressed concern that such shifts could push China's AI software ecosystem away from Nvidia's dominant CUDA platform.
The Inner Mongolia data center is part of China's broader 'Eastern Data, Western Compute' strategy, which aims to relocate energy-intensive computing infrastructure to western regions with cheaper electricity. Ulanqab, where the data center is being built, has seen substantial investment in AI computing projects as part of this initiative. The scale of DeepSeek's potential order underscores Huawei's efforts to ramp up Ascend production to meet growing domestic demand, though it also highlights the ongoing challenges in scaling advanced semiconductor manufacturing within China.