DeepSeek gives China's chipmakers leg up in race for cheaper AI

The rise of DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence (AI) models is seen providing some Chinese chipmakers such as Huawei a better chance to compete in the domestic market against more powerful U.S. processors.

Huawei and its Chinese peers have for years struggled to match Nvidia in building top-end chips that could compete with the U.S. firm’s products for training models, a process where data is fed to algorithms to help them learn to make accurate decisions.

However, DeepSeek’s models, which focus on “inference,” or when an AI model produces conclusions, optimise computational efficiency rather than relying solely on raw processing power.

That is one reason why the model is expected to partly close the gap between what Chinese-made AI processors and their more powerful U.S. counterparts can do, analysts say.

Huawei, and other Chinese AI chipmakers such as Hygon, Tencent-backed EnFlame, Tsingmicro and Moore Threads have in recent weeks issued statements claiming products will support DeepSeek models, although few details have been released.

Huawei declined to comment. Moore Threads, Hygon EnFlame and Tsingmicro did not respond to Reuters queries seeking further comment.

Industry executives are now predicting that DeepSeek’s open-source nature and its low fees could boost adoption of AI and the development of real-life applications for the technology, helping Chinese firms overcome U.S. export curbs on their most powerful chips.

Even before DeepSeek made headlines this year, products such as Huawei’s Ascend 910B were seen by customers such as ByteDance as better suited for less computationally intensive “inference” tasks, the stage after training that involves trained AI models making predictions or performing tasks, such as through chatbots.

In China, dozens of companies from automakers to telecoms providers have announced plans to integrate DeepSeek’s models with their products and operations.

“This development is very much aligned with the capability of Chinese AI chipset vendors,” said Lian Jye Su, a chief analyst at tech research firm Omdia.

“Chinese AI chipsets struggle to compete with Nvidia’s GPU (graphics processing unit) in AI training, but AI inference workloads are much more forgiving and require a lot more local and industry-specific understanding,” he said.