DeepSeek to deploy 160,000 Huawei chips to curb NVIDIA reliance
DeepSeek, an AI startup from China, is planning to set up one of the largest known clusters of Huawei AI chips by deploying at least 160,000 Huawei chips at a new data center in Inner Mongolia.
The big goal? Help China rely less on San Jose, California-based NVIDIA chips, especially since those are now harder to get because of export restrictions.
But there's a catch: DeepSeek's order could be delayed for more than a year due to chip shortages and high demand.
Chinese firms rent NVIDIA compute overseas
If this project takes off, it could seriously boost China's AI power and put its tech scene closer to Western giants.
Still, even with these big plans for self-reliance, DeepSeek has so far relied on NVIDIA accelerators for training its models, while Chinese companies can still access massive quantities of even NVIDIA's best chips by renting computing power located overseas, showing just how tough it is to go fully local in the current tech climate.