DeepSeek bets next model on Huawei chips after Ascend 910C training run failed
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-09-22
Per leaked meeting details, DeepSeek is betting its next model on Huawei silicon after a failed attempt: Liang Wenfeng told investors Huawei should start delivering training chips as early as Q4 and "it has to work" — an earlier run on Ascend 910C failed, and DeepSeek has trained on Nvidia since.
Key points:
- Investors had to hand over phones; the last meeting leaked, including Liang saying DeepSeek could buy "noncompliant cards"
- A $7.5B round is being finalized at a $75B valuation, $4.5B going to compute
- Liang estimates a frontier-scale run needs 50,000 Nvidia GB300s or 200,000 Huawei Ascend 950s
- Huawei's bottleneck is memory: only Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron make the HBM in the most advanced chips
Related event: DeepSeek Bets on Huawei Chips for Next-Gen Model Training(4 posts)→
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