Major Chinese tech firms rush to order Huawei's Ascend 950 AI chips following DeepSeek V4 release

ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba are placing new orders with Huawei for Ascend 950 chips after DeepSeek released its V4 model optimized for the hardware. Cloud computing and GPU rental firms are also scrambling to secure orders.

The Ascend 950PR variant is the only domestic Chinese chip among Huawei's competitors to support a technique that processes AI calculations in compressed numerical format, allowing it to handle more computations per second at lower cost. DeepSeek V4 inference (the step where an AI model produces answers to queries) is fully supported by Huawei's Ascend supernode infrastructure.

Huawei's chips now present an alternative as U.S. export controls restrict Chinese access to Nvidia's most advanced processors. Nvidia's H200 processor has yet to be shipped to China despite U.S. and Chinese export approvals, while the H20 remains the most powerful Nvidia chip permitted for sale in China.