China's DeepSeek pushes for self-developed AI chips…reducing reliance on Nvidia and Huawei

"China's DeepSeek pushes for self-developed AI chips…reducing reliance on Nvidia and Huawei"

Reuters: "Discussions with design, foundry, and memory companies…Huawei's difficulties could increase"

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek is developing its own AI chips, and if this move proves successful, it could reduce its reliance on Nvidia and Huawei, Reuters reported on the 7th, citing multiple sources.

According to the report, DeepSeek has been working to enter the self-developed AI chip competition for about a year and has been discussing with chip design, foundry (semiconductor contract manufacturing), and memory companies.

Sources explained that DeepSeek has increased its hiring of chip design engineers in recent months, recruiting technical personnel through informal methods without posting job openings on recruitment platforms.

Reuters pointed out that global AI developers have been seeking to strengthen hardware control and reduce reliance on Nvidia by securing their own chips, and DeepSeek will join this trend.

OpenAI of the US unveiled its first custom inference chip, 'Halapeno,' co-developed with Broadcom last month. Anthropic, the developer of Claude, is also considering developing its own AI chips.

DeepSeek, unlike other global AI developers, also faces US export control measures.

As Chinese companies are unable to purchase Nvidia's cutting-edge chips due to US controls, Chinese authorities have pressured domestic tech companies to develop 'domestic alternatives.'

DeepSeek has officially used Nvidia's lower-end chips and China's Huawei chips. In particular, it stated that it used lower-end chips such as Nvidia's 'H800,' which had reduced computing power for sales in China, for the production of inference models such as 'R1,' which caused a global shock in January last year. Since then, DeepSeek has gradually increased its reliance on Huawei chips.

Reuters pointed out that Huawei accounted for half of China's domestic AI chip market, worth approximately $50 billion (about 75 trillion won), thanks to US restrictions on advanced semiconductor exports to China. However, Huawei's market dominance is already weakening as companies like Alibaba and Baidu develop their own AI chips and increase their market share.

In this situation, with DeepSeek also making a strategic shift to develop its own chips, Huawei could face even greater difficulties, Reuters predicted.