Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent Purchase Huawei Ascend 950 AI Processor to Prepare for DeepSeek V4, Chip Price Increases by 20% in Recent Weeks

According to 1M AI News monitoring, Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent have made large-scale purchases of Huawei's Ascend 950PR. The total order volume amounts to hundreds of thousands of chips. The three companies plan to distribute this model through their cloud services and integrate it into AI applications after the DeepSeek V4 release. This concentrated purchasing effort has driven up the price of the Ascend 950PR by 20% in recent weeks, with mass production of the chip starting this month.

Meanwhile, prior to the V4 release, DeepSeek only granted early access to Chinese chip companies such as Huawei, rejecting Nvidia's participation. Typically, chip companies are given early access before a major model release to prepare supporting software. This exclusivity meant that domestic chips had a head start on software adaptation before the V4 public release. Reuters had previously reported Nvidia's exclusion. DeepSeek has been collaborating with Huawei and the chip design firm Cambricon to advance the hardware adaptation work for V4.

The original plan was to launch V4 in February this year. Migrating the model from Nvidia architecture to Huawei chips required rewriting the underlying code and extensive testing, which was a key reason for the delay. Currently, DeepSeek is also developing two additional variants of V4, each optimized for different capability dimensions, both based on Chinese chip designs.

Nvidia's H20 was previously widely used by Chinese companies to run DeepSeek models, but the Chinese government has banned large tech companies from purchasing this chip. The entry of the more powerful H200 into the Chinese market remains uncertain. With very limited options available, Huawei is almost the sole domestic company stockpiling before the V4 release.