DeepSeek and Huawei are reportedly collaborating on future AI chip designs, and DeepSeek plans to start using Huawei's Ascend 950DT for pre-training as soon as the end of 2026, according to Techmeme, which credits The Information and its sources.
The summary includes no comment from either company.
What the report says
- Co-design: DeepSeek and Huawei are working together on future AI chip designs.
- Timing: DeepSeek would begin pre-training, the costly first stage of building a model, on the Ascend 950DT as soon as the end of 2026.
What the chip is
Huawei's Connect 2025 keynote says the Ascend 950PR and 950DT share the same Ascend 950 die. The 950PR targets inference prefill and recommendation systems, while the 950DT targets inference decode and model training.
Huawei said the 950DT would be available in the fourth quarter of 2026, and that it powers the Atlas 950 SuperPoD. The 950 series is listed at 2 TB/s of interconnect bandwidth.
What is not confirmed
- Scale: The report gives no chip counts or dates for the design work.
- Pre-training: The end-of-2026 start is a plan, and plans can slip.
The news landed the same day US agencies were reportedly told to remove DeepSeek from federal systems. For more on the apps and models, see AI apps.
