DeepSeek to pre-train on Huawei Ascend 950DT by end of 2026

DeepSeek plans to start pre-training on Huawei's Ascend 950DT as soon as the end of 2026, The Information reported, with Huawei engineers stationed inside DeepSeek's offices to fold the lab's feedback into future Ascend designs.

The engineers are "incorporating its feedback into chip designs, including how AI models perform calculations and transfer data between processors," according to the reporting. Huawei plans to launch the 950DT in the fourth quarter of 2026 with 144GB of its own HiZQ 2.0 HBM and 4 TB/s of memory bandwidth, and to prioritize DeepSeek for most of its next-generation Ascend 960DT chips in the first quarter of 2027.

The picture is more mixed in follow-on coverage. A Yahoo Finance read of the same story noted that "the heavy lifting of training new models remains on whatever Nvidia hardware the company can secure," with the Huawei chips moving to inference duty first. Training a frontier model, the article says, "could require more than 10,000 Huawei chips operating together for weeks," a reliability bar Huawei has not yet publicly cleared.

The story lands against a run of China-silicon items in our feed, including 55 DeepSeek stories in 90 days and yesterday's DHS order pulling DeepSeek from US civilian federal IT systems. Locked out of US systems, locked into Chinese silicon.