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Xinlu Liang

China’s northern port city of Tianjin has become the latest local government to adopt the Chinese artificial intelligence system DeepSeek.
Thursday’s announcement by the Hebei district government signals China’s accelerating embrace of home-grown AI for both industrial and governance purposes, the official Tianjin Daily reported.
The Tianjin AI Computing Centre, which will host the system, is a collaboration between Hebei district and Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies launched in March 2023. It is the first facility in the wider region clustered around Beijing to fully integrate DeepSeek’s models, the report said.
The centre is equipped with Huawei’s domestically built 300-PFlop infrastructure – a measure of processing speed equivalent to 300 quadrillion calculations per second.
The DeepSeek models it hosts include its largest 671B-parameter system and six streamlined versions, allowing companies to “plug in and use” them without costly in-house servers, the report said.
Developed by a Chinese start-up, DeepSeek operates on an open-source framework unlike systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
This approach, combined with a lower cost and partnerships with local governments, allows its AI tools to be cheaper and more adaptable for businesses and public services.
Kong Xiangpeng, the centre’s chief executive, highlighted DeepSeek’s cost-cutting edge and said training AI applications now required 50 per cent less hardware investment and 30 per cent less time.
At Thursday’s press conference, officials said an unnamed local medical tech firm had slashed expenses from tens of millions of yuan to under a million yuan (US$137,700) by using the platform.
Over a dozen companies in the wider region that includes Beijing and the surrounding province of Hebei have already contacted the centre to explore collaborations on specialised model development and its use in sectors such as smart manufacturing, finance and healthcare, Kong added.


The adoption of DeepSeek is part of China’s push for “smart governance” through AI and technological self-sufficiency in the face of US restrictions on advanced AI chips.
The centre has partnered with 14 universities to establish AI courses, and plans to replace 14 foreign-derived models with domestic alternatives by the end of this year, “completely eliminating reliance on foreign technology,” according to the report.
Tianjin is a key part of China’s “Eastern Data and Western Computing” project launched in 2022, which aims to build a nationwide information technology network by establishing escight computing hubs across the country.
The project involves building data centres in China’s western interior to process the computing workload generated in more densely populated eastern coast areas.
Huawei, among other Chinese companies, is contributing to the project by operating computing clusters running on Ascend AI chips in 19 cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.


Since last week, the local government of Shenzhen’s Longgang district said staff had been working overtime to deploy DeepSeek’s R1 model on Huawei’s Ascend servers.
The model significantly speeds up tasks such as proofreading, and streamlines processes like searching for lost people using surveillance cameras. It also analyses citizen feedback, helping the government quickly address public concerns, according to local media outlet Southern Metropolis Daily.
The Kunshan city in eastern Jiangsu province recently said it would integrate DeepSeek models into its e-government system, allowing agencies such as the police and transport authority to utilise the AI for data analysis and traffic prediction.


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News

China

Politics

The northern port city is opening an AI computing centre in collaboration with the tech giant Huawei


The northern port city is opening an AI computing centre in collaboration with the tech giant Huawei.


Artificial intelligence

China technology