There’s a lot of talk about DeepSeek lately, and while we know that their R1 LLM was trained on NVIDIA H800 chips, it does use HUAWEI Ascend 910C chips for inference–which is used to generate responses based on the trained model.
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This was confirmed by Alexander Doria and is a big finding, as it shows that DeepSeek also utilizes China-made chips like those from HUAWEI for its AI models. While the Ascend 910C is not used for training, HUAWEI aims to address this with its upcoming Ascend 920C AI chips, which it claims can rival NVIDIA’s Blackwell B200 AI chip.
With DeepSeek being the most downloaded app in Apple’s app store in 51 countries–and the fact that it uses HUAWEI chips–Western AI companies like OpenAI are not happy about this. Recently, OpenAI complained that its rivals–including those in China–are using its work to develop their own AI tools. Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI is also investigating whether data belonging to OpenAI was used in an unauthorized way.
In a report by Fox News, White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks claims that DeepSeek may have used knowledge distillation to improve their AI models. “There’s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI’s models,” Sacks said.
