DeepSeek V4 Boosts Demand for Huawei's Ascend AI Chips

According to Reuters, citing informed sources, demand for Huawei's Ascend 950 AI chips has surged following the launch of DeepSeek V4. Companies like ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba, some of China's large internet firms, have reached out to Huawei for additional orders.

Reuters states that the 950PR in the Ascend 950 series is currently the only product among locally made chips in China that supports AI computations with more compressed numerical formats, allowing it to handle more computational tasks at a lower cost. The report mentions that the 950PR significantly outperforms NVIDIA's H20 but still lags behind the more advanced H200, which, although approved for export between China and the US, has not yet been shipped to China due to disagreements on sales conditions.

The rapid integration with cloud platforms further amplifies the demand for computing power. The compatibility of DeepSeek V4 with Huawei's chips will increase model availability, boosting the volume of inference calls and传导 this demand to the underlying AI chips. Alibaba Cloud's Bai Lian platform launched V4-Pro and V4-Flash on the day of V4's release, while Tencent Cloud also introduced V4 preview services through TokenHub on the same day, deploying at domestic nodes and the Singapore International Gateway.

DeepSeek has indicated that the price of V4-Pro may drop significantly in the second half of 2026 after the scale shipment of Huawei Ascend 950 supernodes, but supply shortages will continue until capacity ramps up. Informed sources say that Huawei plans to ship approximately 750,000 units of the 950PR this year, starting mass production in April, and initiating full-scale shipments in the second half of 2026.