DeepSeek Secretly Develops Proprietary Inference Chip

According to Dynamic Insight monitoring, Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, that China's major AI firm, DeepSeek, is developing its own AI inference chip. This R&D effort started about a year ago and is primarily focused on model inference rather than model training. Over the past few months, the company has been quietly recruiting chip design engineers.

Currently, DeepSeek's model operation and training heavily rely on chips from NVIDIA and Huawei. If successful, the in-house developed inference chip will reduce reliance on external suppliers and gain more cost-effective hardware control. However, this project is still in the early stages and faces manufacturing and memory acquisition restrictions due to U.S. export controls.