DeepSeek Teams with Huawei on Chip Programming Tools Amid Nvidia Shift

DeepSeek has partnered with Huawei Technologies to develop programming tools for Huawei's Ascend chips. This move comes amid China's push to reduce its reliance on Nvidia, a US-based company.

According to DeepSeek, the two companies have collaborated on developing an open-source programming backbone for Huawei's Ascend line of chips. Huawei has also provided full support in this development process.

The partnership comes after Huawei announced a new line of AI chips for use in computing superclusters and data centers. The company expects its AI chips to be widely used for model training by 2027.

DeepSeek, considered one of China's premier AI frontier labs, had initially relied heavily on Nvidia hardware. However, the company has been shifting towards domestic alternatives since 2026.