Chinese Companies Mobilize Support for DeepSeek's AI Models, Heralding a "Watershed Moment" for the Industry
Chinese tech giants, including chip manufacturers and cloud service providers, are swiftly embracing DeepSeek's artificial intelligence (AI) models. This surge in support has prompted analysts to proclaim a "watershed moment" for China's AI sector.
Leading AI chipmaker Moore Threads and Hygon Information Technology have announced that their computing clusters and accelerators are now compatible with DeepSeek's R1 and V3 models. Moore Threads hailed DeepSeek's achievements as a potential catalyst for igniting China's AI industry.
Huawei Technologies, another major AI chip producer, has partnered with AI infrastructure startup SiliconFlow to make DeepSeek's models available on its Ascend cloud service. Huawei emphasizes that these models perform comparably to those run on high-end global chips.
Bernstein analysts have hailed Huawei's integration of DeepSeek's models as a pivotal moment. They believe it demonstrates the feasibility of implementing competitive large language models (LLMs) using China's domestically produced chips, potentially reducing dependency on advanced U.S. hardware.
Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent's cloud arms have also facilitated access to DeepSeek's models through their services.
In January, DeepSeek released a free AI assistant that reportedly utilizes less data at a fraction of the cost of current services. The app gained immense popularity, surpassing ChatGPT in downloads within days, leading to a global tech stock selloff.
DeepSeek's research, published in December, garnered attention globally. It revealed that training DeepSeek-V3 required less than $6 million in computing power from Nvidia's H800 chips, significantly lower than the billions invested by tech giants like Meta and Microsoft.
China's government has embraced DeepSeek's success, elevating the Hangzhou-based startup and its founder, Liang Wenfeng, to celebrity status.
While Microsoft and Amazon's cloud services offer DeepSeek's models, concerns over privacy have prompted countries like Italy and the Netherlands to block or investigate the AI app.