China's AI star hails Huawei chip amid dependency issues

Themis Qi and Reuters

China's artificial intelligence star DeepSeek has reportedly proven Huawei's new chip delivers 60 percent of the performance of Nvidia's H100, which could help reduce China's reliance on the US chip giant amid Sino-US tensions.

DeepSeek, which triggered a sell-off of Nvidia shares earlier with its low-cost AI model, found that Huawei's Ascend 910C chips can achieve up to 60 percent of the H100's performance in reasoning tasks based on the startup's research, according to a recent article released on WeChat Official Account AGIHunt.

DeepSeek believes Huawei's chip performed better than expected and it is progressing rapidly despite curbs by the US government from obtaining advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology.

After tests, DeepSeek said its support for Ascend chips could help Huawei's hardware to be easily integrated into the AI workflow.

Huawei plans to start the mass production of 910C chips this year to challenge Nvidia.

Previously, the Ascend chip was reported to have been manufactured by China's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation but failed to achieve a high qualification rate due to the lack of cutting-edge equipment.

DeepSeek announced collaborations with Huawei in recent weeks, as well as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and Nvidia. Even Microsoft has made DeepSeek's model available on its Azure cloud computing platform since January 29, though the US giant and OpenAI it backs are probing whether any data from the ChatGPT developer was accessed by a group linked to the Chinese startup.

Yesterday, China's laptop giant Lenovo said it has partnered with mainland graphics processing unit MetaX to unveil an all-in-one solution based on DeepSeek's AI model, further widening the adoption of the homegrown technology.

Lisa Su, head of another US chip leader, Advanced Micro Devices, said the emergence of DeepSeek will benefit AI use.

However, some countries have banned DeepSeek. Australia announced its ban on Wednesday from all government devices on the advice of security agencies.

themis.qi@singtaonewscorp.com