DeepSeek V4 Launch Sparks Demand, Chinese Tech Giants Rush for Huawei Ascend 950 Chips
Following the official release of DeepSeek V4, market demand for Huawei's Ascend 950 series AI chips has surged. Several leading Chinese tech companies are urgently securing chip supply orders. Sources reveal that ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba have already contacted Huawei regarding additional chip orders. Companies specializing in cloud computing and GPU leasing are also actively working to finalize orders.
The Ascend 950PR chip, which triggered this market rush, represents a significant technological breakthrough for Huawei. For many years, Huawei has consistently faced challenges in securing large-scale orders from the domestic tech industry.
In January of this year, Huawei distributed chip samples to companies like ByteDance and Alibaba. Customer testing yielded positive feedback, prompting these companies to initiate ordering plans. In terms of performance, the Ascend 950PR outperforms NVIDIA's China-specific H20 chip.
Among domestic chip manufacturers, Huawei's Ascend 950 series, particularly the 950PR model, is the only domestically produced chip that supports compressed numerical format AI computation technology. This technology allows the chip to achieve more calculations per second at a lower cost.
The U.S. export controls on NVIDIA's high-end chips are the core reason behind the recent surge in demand for domestic chips. Huawei has previously announced that its Ascend Supernode infrastructure, based on the Ascend 950 series chips, will fully support the DeepSeek V4 model. The entire product line has also completed specialized adaptation for the model's inference stage.
On the day of the model's release, Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud quickly launched DeepSeek V4-related services. The influx of users and developers has further increased the demand for underlying computing power chips.
The supply-demand gap will likely persist. Sources reveal that Huawei plans to produce approximately 750,000 Ascend 950PR chips in 2026. Chip mass production began in April, and full-scale shipments will commence in the second half of the year.
However, due to U.S. export controls on advanced chip manufacturing equipment, domestic companies cannot access top-tier manufacturing equipment. Chip production capacity is expected to remain insufficient to meet the rapidly growing market demand.