DeepSeek is using Huawei chips to pretrain its flagship model and is co-designing the chips (report)

Verified (fact)

According to Korean media citing The Information, DeepSeek is working with Huawei from the design stage of its next-generation AI chips. Huawei has reportedly placed engineers at DeepSeek's offices for long periods so that the model side's requirements feed into chip design. The collaboration reportedly goes beyond supplying parts or sharing roadmaps, extending to jointly tuning compute methods and the efficiency of data transfer between processors.

Why it matters (interpretation)

If it is confirmed that a frontier-class model can be pretrained on Chinese chips alone, it would mark a turning point in China's AI infrastructure strategy to reduce reliance on NVIDIA.

Sources

• Press 딥시크, 플래그십 모델 사전학습에 화웨이 칩 본격 투입..."국산 AI 자립 속도" AI Times (Korea)

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