Chinese tech firms including Alibaba and ByteDance are turning to Huawei for AI chips as DeepSeek's V4 models drive demand for its Ascend 950 processors

Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent have started reaching out to Huawei to secure supply of its AI chips, following the launch of DeepSeek's V4 models, which are designed to run on Huawei's Ascend 950 chips.

DeepSeek's V4 models are positioned as strong performers for coding, reasoning, and agent-style tasks (AI systems that make autonomous decisions to complete work), with Huawei providing infrastructure support to make the ecosystem usable.

Huawei is planning to ship about 750K units of its 950PR chips this year, but supply may not fully meet demand as Chinese companies increasingly seek domestic alternatives due to ongoing restrictions on access to chips from Nvidia and AMD.