Tech war: China’s chip firms embrace DeepSeek in AI self-sufficiency drive

From Moore Threads to Iluvatar Corex, China’s leading chip designers are rushing to adopt DeepSeek’s latest models

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Moore Threads CEO Zhang Jianzhong. The chip designing company says it will open its KUAE platform to support the distribution of DeepSeek’s V3 and R1 models. Photo: Handout

Published: 7:00am, 5 Feb 2025

DeepSeek has given China’s artificial intelligence (AI) push a shot in the arm, as the country’s chip developers and cloud service providers rush to support the start-up’s increasingly popular models.

Moore Threads Technology, a graphics processing unit (GPU) design company created by former Nvidia China general manager Zhang Jianzhong, said in a WeChat post on Tuesday that it would “pay tribute to DeepSeek” by “using locally-made GPUs to set China’s AI ecosystem on fire”.

The chip firm said DeepSeek’s open-source V3 and R1 models had “greatly promoted” AI development and provided “inspiration” for developers.

“To push forward the development of the domestic AI ecosystem, Moore Threads will open its proprietary KUAE GPU intelligent computing cluster to fully support the distributed deployment of DeepSeek’s V3 and R1 models,” the company wrote, referring to its full-stack solution for AI data centres based on its own chips.

Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek has taken the global tech community by storm. Photo: EPA-EFE

Moore Threads’ pledge comes days after China’s tech champion Huawei Technologies said it was working with Beijing-based AI infrastructure start-up SiliconFlow to make DeepSeek’s models available to end users through the telecoms giant’s Ascend cloud service. It offers computing performance matching that of DeepSeek models running on global premium GPUs, according to Huawei.

Huawei’s Ascend cloud service relied on its home-grown Ascend solution for compute resources, which could involve various types of hardware including the company’s self-developed server clusters, AI modules and accelerator cards, its website said.