Chinese chip manufacturers, cloud companies hurry to welcome native DeepSeek

By Brenda Goh and Yuhan Lin

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Chinese business, from chip manufacturers to shadow provider, are hurrying to sustain DeepSeek’s expert system versions, stimulating experts to hail a “watershed moment” for the sector.

Moore Threads and Hygon Information Technology, that makes AI chips and wants to take on Nvidia, stated on Monday their computer collections and accelerators would certainly have the ability to sustain DeepSeek’s R1 and V3 versions.

“We pay tribute to DeepSeek,” Moore Threads headlined its article on We Conversation, including that development by the company’s versions utilizing locally made visuals handling systems (GPU) can “set on fire” China’s AI sector.

On Saturday, Huawei Technologies, which additionally has its very own line of AI chips, stated it was dealing with AI framework start-up SiliconFlow to make DeepSeek’s versions readily available to clients on its Ascend cloud solution.

Their efficiency approached versions work on worldwide, premium chips, it included.

The information that Huawei had actually incorporated DeepSeek’s versions with its Ascend chips noted a “watershed moment,” Bernstein experts stated in a note on Sunday.

“DeepSeek demonstrates that competitive large language models (LLM) can be deployed on China’s ‘good enough’ chips, easing reliance on cutting-edge U.S. hardware”,” they added, citing Ascend and planned chips from Cambricon and Hygon.

Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent’s cloud arms have also said they have made DeepSeek’s models accessible via their services.

Last month, DeepSeek launched a free AI assistant that it says uses less data at a fraction of the cost of existing services.

Within a few days, its app overtook U.S. rival ChatGPT in downloads from Apple’s App Store, triggering a global selloff in tech shares.

Earlier the company earlier drew attention in global AI circles with a research paper in December that said the training of DeepSeek-V3 required less than $6 million worth of computing power from Nvidia’s H800 chips, versus the billions of dollars spent by the likes of tech giants Meta and Microsoft.

China has welcomed its success, turning the startup based in the eastern city of Hangzhou, and the firm’s founder, Liang Wenfeng, into pop culture celebrities.

Microsoft and Amazon’s cloud services have also started offering DeepSeek’s models but several countries such as Italy and the Netherlands have blocked, or are investigating, DeepSeek’s AI app on concerns of privacy.

(Reporting by Brenda Goh and Lin Yuhan; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)