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Latest / Chips, compute and energy

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DeepSeek and Huawei narrow AI chip gap with Nvidia, SemiAnalysis says

See how this story connects

Source: SemiAnalysisAlso reported by South China Morning Post

SemiAnalysis published a report on 21 October 2026, by Bryan Shan and Dylan Patel, on what it calls the symbiosis between Huawei Technologies and DeepSeek. It says DeepSeek published Ascend support for six of its own software projects on 30 September 2026, TileLang, DeepGEMM, DeepEP, TileKernels, FlashMLA and DeepSelect, and that Huawei supplies the chips and their software stack while DeepSeek supplies the models and the engineering to run them on it. The report benchmarks an Ascend 950PR card with 28 cube cores and 128 GiB of memory, and says DeepSeek is likely to run primarily on Huawei’s stack by 2027 or 2028.

Why it matters

Kernels and compilers DeepSeek wrote for Nvidia chips now run on Huawei’s, the step a Chinese lab needs to train and serve frontier models without Nvidia hardware.

When
21 Oct 2026
ID
WTA-N-2026-0370
Who
DeepSeek, Huawei Technologies, Nvidia, SemiAnalysis; Bryan Shan, Dylan Patel

Summary by wheresthe.ai, from SemiAnalysis and the reporting credited above. Checked against the source on 22 Oct 2026.

Read the original at SemiAnalysis

Source copy: download the page as saved on 22 Oct 2026 (PDF). Also held by the Internet Archive.

Next stop on this Storyline: What happened nextDeepSeek reported to have raised about 100 billion yuan from CATL, Tencent and others

Cite this story

WTA-N-2026-0370: “DeepSeek and Huawei narrow AI chip gap with Nvidia, SemiAnalysis says.” wheresthe.ai, 21 Oct 2026. https://wheresthe.ai/d/cn-deepseek-and-huawei-narrow-ai-chip-gap-with-nvidia-semian-2026-10/ (source: SemiAnalysis).

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