DeepSeek and Huawei develop chip programming tools under collaboration announced on September 30
Key Facts
DeepSeek is working with Huawei to develop programming tools for Ascend chips, according to a Reuters report published on September 30, in a move aimed at building the software needed to use the Chinese company's platform. DeepSeek said it is making an open-source software infrastructure available for the platform, including a high-level programming language and associated libraries. The joint work focuses on computing and communication tools that developers use to program chips. The company places developing a language that combines ease of use with the ability to harness hardware capabilities at the forefront of its priorities for building an independent graphics processing unit ecosystem. The software collaboration comes alongside DeepSeek's work on developing its own AI chip, according to an earlier Reuters report.
DeepSeek describes the programming model in its TileLang language as simpler than Nvidia's CUDA, according to Reuters, citing the company. Nvidia defines CUDA as a parallel computing platform and programming model that enable operations to be accelerated using graphics processing units. Nvidia's ecosystem thus includes tools for writing and running software alongside the chips that perform computations. DeepSeek said, "The first priority is to establish a high-level language that is general-purpose and easy to program." The company wants the language to combine ease of writing programs with the ability to harness hardware capabilities, as part of the open-source infrastructure it is making available for Huawei's platform.
Huawei's efforts to broaden participation in developing its software draw on a growing contribution from developers outside the company. Huawei said in an announcement in September that external developers account for 61% of all developers on its CANN software platform. It added that they outnumbered internal developers for the first time, giving external contributors the largest share of the platform's developer community. The company had previously announced the establishment of CANN's technical steering committee as part of a strategy to develop its software infrastructure. That strategy includes separating infrastructure layers and open-source collaboration, an approach that encompasses making development tools and libraries available for external participation.
In the chip market, Nvidia shipped 678,000 data-center AI chips in China in the six months through June, according to IDC data cited by Reuters. That represented a year-on-year decline of 44% from the corresponding period, according to the report published by Investing in October, citing the agency. By contrast, Reuters cited sources in an earlier report in September as saying Chinese demand for Nvidia chips remained strong despite government pressure against buying them. The sources attributed the continued demand to limited supplies of competing products from domestic companies. The companies named by the sources included Huawei and Cambricon, which compete with Nvidia to meet the needs of the Chinese market.
Reuters reported in July, citing sources familiar with the matter, that DeepSeek was developing its own AI chip. The project adds hardware design to the company's work on programming tools for Huawei's platform. DeepSeek's activities covered in the agency's reports thus span chips and the software used to run them. During the premarket trading covered in the July report on the chip project, Nvidia shares fell about 1.6%. That move came as DeepSeek's own project was disclosed, preceding the announcement of its software collaboration with Huawei in September.
Huawei's updated chip release roadmap includes dates in 2027, according to announcements published by the company. Huawei set the first quarter of the year for making the Ascend 960 DT chip available. It said that date was 3 quarters ahead of the original roadmap, bringing forward the product's availability. The company then plans to make the Ascend 960 PR available in the third quarter of 2027. According to Huawei's announcement, that model's release date is also a quarter ahead of the previous plan, placing the planned availability of the two models in the first and third quarters.