DeepSeek and Huawei Collaborate on Ascend AI Chips

Oct 20, 2026
DeepSeek plans to invest in Huawei's AI chip design and help improve Ascend processors for training large language models.

DeepSeek plans to invest in Huawei's AI chip design and work with the company on Ascend processors and software, The Information reported, according to Dataconomy. DeepSeek will give Huawei data on the computational problems it meets when running large language models.

Huawei will focus on memory bandwidth efficiency and the interconnect framework of its next generation Ascend chips, aiming to ease the training of large models that run across thousands of chips. The companies also plan an open source ecosystem that includes a local AI model supporting the full hardware and software stack.

Huawei will strengthen its CANN computing platform, which competes with Nvidia's CUDA. Its 2027 roadmap includes the Ascend 960DT in the first quarter and the Ascend 960PR in the third quarter.

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