Deepseek plans the largest known Huawei chip cluster with 160,000 processors in Inner Mongolia
Deepseek plans to deploy at least 160,000 of Huawei's next-generation Ascend-950DT chips in a massive data center in Inner Mongolia. The chips would only run inference, not training, according to Bloomberg . For the much heavier training workloads, Deepseek still uses Nvidia hardware. If built, this would be the largest known Huawei chip cluster and a real step toward weaning China off Nvidia.
Huawei probably can't deliver the full order for over a year, though, thanks to production limits and memory chip shortages . The memory bottleneck could loosen up. China's top memory maker, CXMT, is turning out small batches of HBM3E for the first time , the high-speed memory that powers many AI processors. But CXMT is still three to five years behind Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, all of which are already mass-producing HBM4. Deepseek's order is part of a bigger Chinese government push to grow its own chip industry without falling behind in AI .
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