Chinese Companies Embrace DeepSeek's AI, Spurring Industry Growth

Chinese firms across sectors, including chip manufacturers and cloud service providers, are eagerly aligning with DeepSeek's advanced artificial intelligence models. This development has prompted analysts to declare it a pivotal moment for the industry.

Moore Threads and Hygon Information Technology, AI chip developers aiming to rival Nvidia, announced recently that their computing clusters and accelerators will support DeepSeek's R1 and V3 models. Moore Threads hailed DeepSeek in a WeChat post, emphasizing that leveraging domestically produced GPUs with its models could ignite China's AI landscape.

Huawei Technologies, with its own AI chip offerings, revealed on Saturday a collaboration with SiliconFlow to provide DeepSeek's models to Ascend cloud service subscribers. Performance on Ascend chips is comparable to that achieved on premium global chips, Huawei noted.

Bernstein analysts lauded the integration of DeepSeek's models with Huawei's Ascend chips as a watershed event. They observed that DeepSeek proves the feasibility of deploying competitive large language models (LLMs) on China's domestically developed chips, reducing reliance on cutting-edge US hardware from the likes of Nvidia.

Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent's cloud divisions have also declared support for DeepSeek's models through their respective services.

Last month, DeepSeek released a free AI assistant, claiming it utilizes minimal data at a fraction of the cost compared to existing solutions. Within a short timeframe, its app surpassed US competitor ChatGPT in downloads on Apple's App Store, triggering a global tech stock sell-off.

DeepSeek had previously gained international recognition in December with a research study indicating that training its DeepSeek-V3 model required less than $6 million worth of computing power from Nvidia's H800 chips, significantly less than the billions spent by tech giants like Meta and Microsoft.

China has embraced DeepSeek's success, elevating the Hangzhou-based startup and its founder, Liang Wenfeng, to pop culture icons.

While Microsoft and Amazon's cloud services now offer DeepSeek's models, several countries including Italy and the Netherlands have implemented restrictions or investigations on the AI application due to privacy concerns.