In April 2026, DeepSeek released V4 — a 1.6 trillion parameter MoE model — and for the first time, the technical report listed Huawei's Ascend NPU alongside NVIDIA in its validated hardware list. This is the story of what that means for the actual supply chain, the bottlenecks that remain, and where this is heading.
The Validation That Changed Everything
When DeepSeek released V4 on April 24, 2026, most of the attention went to the model's benchmark scores matching GPT-5 and Claude Opus. But a quieter — and arguably more consequential — event was buried in the fine print:
DeepSeek V4 is the first top-tier model to fully validate inference on Huawei's Ascend 950PR chip.
This wasn't a "it compiles" checkbox validation. The DeepSeek team:
