AI TRENDS | DeepSeek Plans 160,000 Huawei AI Chips For Inner Mongolia Data Center

Bloomberg reported that DeepSeek plans to deploy at least 160,000 of Huawei's most advanced AI accelerator chips at a data center under construction in Inner Mongolia. The planned cluster could become one of the largest known Huawei AI chip installations and would further reduce China's reliance on Nvidia chips, according to ETNet. DeepSeek is said to be considering Huawei's next-generation Ascend 950DT chips to run its models, but the timing of installation will depend on Huawei's production capacity. One source said DeepSeek does not currently plan to use the 950DT chips for model training and still relies mainly on Nvidia accelerators for that key process. Bloomberg said Huawei's output of the 950DT this year will be limited to the low end of several hundred thousand units because of shortages of high-end memory and other components. Sources said Huawei also needs to balance demand from other customers and export a small number of products overseas, so completing the DeepSeek order could take more than a year. DeepSeek is also in talks to raise several billion dollars to expand its infrastructure. DeepSeek and Huawei did not immediately comment.