DeepSeek is preparing a large order of Huawei AI chips for a new data centre, according to Bloomberg. Neither the size of the order nor the chip model has been disclosed, and DeepSeek has not confirmed the plan.
The data centre has been reported since the summer. Bloomberg described a site of roughly one gigawatt in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, which could begin partial operations in late 2027 or early 2028. The reporting is based on people familiar with the project rather than information from DeepSeek itself.
Ulanqab is part of a broader Chinese strategy. The Eastern Data, Western Compute programme is moving energy-intensive computing infrastructure towards western regions where electricity is cheaper, and Inner Mongolia has signed around $27bn in AI computing projects as part of that push.
The choice of chips is the more significant part of the story. Nvidia’s most capable AI accelerators cannot legally be sold in China, leaving Huawei’s Ascend family as one of the main domestic options for a Chinese AI lab building computing capacity at this scale.
DeepSeek has been moving in that direction for months. Its V4 model was tuned to run on Huawei’s Ascend 950 when it launched in April, and Chinese cloud providers subsequently placed orders for hundreds of thousands of the chips.
