DeepSeek optimizes V4 for Huawei chips

China’s biggest internet companies are rushing to secure Huawei artificial-intelligence chips after DeepSeek launched a new V4 model family built to run on them. (finance.yahoo.com) Reuters reported on April 29 that ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba have been contacting Huawei about fresh orders for Ascend 950 chips after the April 24 V4 release. People familiar with the talks said demand jumped immediately. (finance.yahoo.com) DeepSeek’s preview came in two versions, V4-Pro and V4-Flash. Reuters said the startup adapted the models for Huawei chip technology, and Huawei said its hardware supported V4 and was used for part of V4-Flash training. (tech.yahoo.com) (news.cgtn.com) That matters because training is the heavy lifting in artificial intelligence: the stage where a model learns from huge datasets. Inference is the serving step, when a finished model answers prompts, and Huawei is now being tied to both parts of that pipeline. (tech.yahoo.com) (techwireasia.com) DeepSeek’s earlier V3 and R1 systems were trained on Nvidia chips, but Reuters reported on April 3 that the company had been working with Huawei and Cambricon to rewrite parts of V4’s code for Chinese processors. The Information said Chinese tech groups had already placed orders totaling hundreds of thousands of Huawei chips ahead of launch. (money.usnews.com) The V4 launch followed months of delay. A social-media account affiliated with China Central Television said the holdup came from reworking the software stack so the model could run on Huawei Ascend chips instead of relying on Nvidia’s ecosystem. (msn.com) DeepSeek is also using price to widen adoption. Reuters said V4-Pro and V4-Flash were released as open-source previews, with the company positioning Pro against leading closed-source systems while selling a cheaper Flash tier for lighter workloads. (tech.yahoo.com) Huawei’s Ascend line sits at the center of China’s effort to replace U.S. chips restricted by export controls. A model that is tuned for Huawei hardware gives Chinese cloud providers and app companies a more complete domestic stack: chips, servers, software and models from Chinese suppliers. (finance.yahoo.com) (money.usnews.com) DeepSeek has not publicly detailed every processor used across V4’s development, and Reuters said the company did not disclose the full training setup. What is clear from the April 24 launch and the April 29 chip scramble is that Huawei’s hardware is now central to how V4 is being deployed — and bought. (tech.yahoo.com) (finance.yahoo.com)