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DeepSeek lines up 160,000 Huawei Ascend chips for its Inner Mongolia data centre

DeepSeek wants at least 160,000 of Huawei's next-generation Ascend 950DT chips for a new Inner Mongolia data centre, running only inference on them while keeping Nvidia hardware for training. The chip's street price runs about 16,000 dollars, putting the order near 2.56 billion dollars, but memory shortages mean Huawei likely cannot deliver it inside a year.

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Two technicians move an unmarked crate toward mostly empty server racks in an open data-centre hall on the Inner Mongolian steppe, with a lorry and wind turbines outside.

DeepSeek shifts its inference workload to Huawei

DeepSeek plans to install at least 160,000 of Huawei's next-generation Ascend 950DT chips at a new gigawatt-scale data centre in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, according to a Bloomberg report cited by The Decoder. The company intends to run only inference workloads on the Huawei chips, keeping Nvidia hardware for training even though the 950DT is designed to handle both. If it is built at that scale, the site would form the largest known cluster of Chinese-made AI accelerators, and it is expected to consume enough electricity to power roughly 750,000 homes. Wccftech, drawing on the same Bloomberg reporting, put the order's value near 2.56 billion dollars, based on the Ascend 950DT's street price of about 16,000 dollars per chip, below the 15,000-to-25,000 dollar range Nvidia's China-specific H20 chip commands. Each Ascend 950DT carries 144 GB of high-bandwidth memory and can be linked with up to 8,192 other units into Huawei's Atlas 950 SuperPoD cluster.[1], [2]

The order's delivery is the weak link

Both outlets describe production capacity as the order's central constraint. The Decoder reports that Huawei's manufacturing limits and a shortage of memory chips mean it likely cannot deliver the full 160,000-chip order for more than a year. Wccftech puts a number on that ceiling, noting Huawei's Ascend 950DT output is currently limited to only a few hundred thousand units per year, so DeepSeek's order alone would absorb a large share of that annual supply. The 950DT is built on Huawei's third-generation DaVinci v3 architecture, fabricated on SMIC's N+3 process, and supports low-precision formats including FP8 and FP4 alongside a proprietary HiF8 format.[1], [2]

A domestic memory supplier is still catching up

The Decoder adds that China's CXMT has begun producing HBM3E memory domestically, but the outlet writes that CXMT's output still trails Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron by three to five years, a gap that sits alongside Huawei's own constrained chip supply. Wccftech frames the order itself as a sign of shifting momentum in China's chip market, noting that DeepSeek's move away from Nvidia's H20 toward Huawei's chips follows public remarks from DeepSeek's chief executive in July that a Huawei-based cluster can match Nvidia's GB300 on many tasks, at roughly four times the chip count and with a reported two-year technology gap.[1], [2]

References

  1. News sourceThe DecoderDeepSeek lines up 160,000 Huawei Ascend chips in Inner Mongolia, all of them for inference↩1↩2↩3
  2. News sourceWccftechDeepSeek's Huawei chip order carries a roughly 2.56 billion dollar street price↩1↩2↩3
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