According to a report by U.S. digital news outlet The Information on Friday, China’s DeepSeek will power its new AI model, called V4, using the latest chips designed by Huawei Technologies.
In preparation for the V4 launch, major Chinese tech companies including Alibaba Group, ByteDance, and Tencent Holdings have placed large orders totaling hundreds of thousands of units for Huawei’s upcoming chip, the report said, citing five people with direct knowledge of the purchases.
The next-generation model is expected to be released within the next few weeks. Huawei and DeepSeek did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment made outside normal business hours.
Over the past several months, DeepSeek has been working closely with Huawei and another Chinese chip designer, Cambricon Technologies, to help rewrite parts of the model’s underlying code and conduct testing, according to two people close to the company.
The report also noted that DeepSeek is developing two additional V4 variants, each optimized for different capabilities and designed to run on Chinese-made chips.
Earlier this year, Reuters reported that DeepSeek had broken from standard industry practice by not sharing its upcoming flagship model with U.S. chipmakers for performance optimization ahead of a major update. Instead, the lab gave early access to domestic suppliers like Huawei.
The release of DeepSeek’s low-cost models V3 and R1 triggered a global selloff in tech stocks last year, leading investors to question whether U.S. AI firms truly needed to spend billions of dollars on AI computing power. Since then, anticipation has been high for DeepSeek-V4, the yet-to-be-released next-generation model.
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