DeepSeek is designing its own artificial-intelligence chip, according to a Reuters report published on Monday that cited people familiar with the matter. The move, if it holds up, would push China’s most closely watched AI lab from writing software that runs on other companies’ silicon to specifying the silicon itself.
The Hangzhou startup has spent the past year tuning its models for Huawei’s Ascend processors and other domestic Chinese silicon, a departure from its earlier reliance on Nvidia hardware. A chip of its own design would extend that shift a further step, from adapting to Chinese hardware to defining it.
The reported chip is meant for inference, the stage where a trained model answers user queries, rather than for training, the far more compute-hungry work of building the model in the first place. DeepSeek released its V4-Pro and V4-Flash models in April, a trillion-parameter line the company itself says trails the Western frontier by roughly three to six months.
According to the Reuters account, the chip would be fabricated by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, China’s largest foundry, rather than Taiwan’s TSMC.
SMIC has been cut off from the most advanced chipmaking tools by US and Dutch export controls, and is widely reported to be stuck on a 7-nanometre process several generations behind the leading edge.
