Chinese chipmakers, cloud providers rush to embrace home-grown AI upstart DeepSeek
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The cloud arms of China’s biggest internet companies said they have made DeepSeek’s models accessible via their services.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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SHANGHAI - Chinese companies, from chipmakers to cloud service providers, are rushing to support DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence (AI) models, spurring analysts to hail a “watershed moment” for the industry.
Moore Threads and Hygon Information Technology, which makes AI chips and looks to compete with Nvidia, said on Feb 3 that their computing clusters and accelerators would be able to support DeepSeek’s R1 and V3 models.
“We pay tribute to DeepSeek,” Moore Threads headlined its post on WeChat, adding that progress by the firm’s models using domestically made graphic processing units could “set on fire” China’s AI industry.
On Feb 1, Huawei Technologies, which also has its own line of AI chips, said it was working with AI infrastructure start-up SiliconFlow to make DeepSeek’s models available to customers on its Ascend cloud service. Their performance was comparable to models run on global, high-end chips, it added.
The news that Huawei had integrated DeepSeek’s models with its Ascend chips marked a “watershed moment”, Bernstein analysts said in a note on Feb 2.
“DeepSeek demonstrates that competitive large language models can be deployed on China’s ‘good-enough’ chips, easing reliance on cutting-edge US hardware,” they added, citing Ascend and planned chips from Cambricon and Hygon.
The cloud arms of China’s biggest internet companies – Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent – also said they have made DeepSeek’s models accessible via their services.
In January, DeepSeek launched a free AI assistant that it says uses less data at a fraction of the cost of existing services.
Within a few days, its app overtook US rival ChatGPT in downloads from Apple’s App Store, triggering a global sell-off in tech shares.
Earlier, the company drew attention in global AI circles with a research paper in December that said the training of DeepSeek-V3 required less than US$6 million (S$8.1 million) worth of computing power from Nvidia’s H800 chips, versus the billions of dollars spent by the likes of tech giants Meta and Microsoft.
China has welcomed DeepSeek’s success, turning the start-up based in the eastern city of Hangzhou and the firm’s founder Liang Wenfeng into pop culture celebrities.
Microsoft and Amazon’s cloud services have also started offering DeepSeek’s models, but several countries such Australia, Italy and the Netherlands have blocked, or are investigating, DeepSeek’s AI app on concerns of privacy. REUTERS
