According to people familiar with the matter, after the official release of DeepSeekV4, the market demand for Huawei’s Ascend 950 series AI chips has surged. Many domestic leading technology companies are urgently locking in chip supply orders. Sources revealed that ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba, the three leading domestic Internet companies, have already contacted Huawei for new chip orders. Two other people familiar with the matter added that companies mainly engaged in cloud computing and GPU rental services are also actively promoting the placement of orders.
The Shengteng 950PR chip that triggered panic buying in the market is an important technological breakthrough for Huawei. For many years, Huawei has continued to face challenges in securing large-scale orders from the domestic technology industry.
In January this year, Huawei distributed chip samples to companies such as ByteDance and Alibaba. Customer test feedback showed good performance, and relevant companies immediately launched an order plan. In terms of performance, Ascend 950PR performs better than NVIDIA China’s special version of the H20 chip.
Among domestic chip manufacturers, Huawei's Ascend 950 series, especially the 950PR model, is the only domestic chip that supports compressed numerical format AI computing technology. This technology allows chips to achieve more computing processing per second at a lower cost.
The U.S.'s export controls on NVIDIA's high-end chips are the core background for this surge in demand for domestic chips. Huawei has previously announced that the Ascend super node infrastructure based on Ascend 950 series chips will fully support the DeepSeek V4 model. The entire product line has also completed special adaptations for the inference link of this model.
On the day the model was released, Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud quickly launched DeepSeekV4 related services. The access of massive users and developers has further increased the demand for underlying computing chips.
The gap between supply and demand will continue to exist. People familiar with the matter revealed that Huawei plans to produce about 750,000 Ascend 950PR chips in 2026. The chip has started mass production in April and will start full shipment in the second half of the year.
However, due to the export control of advanced chip manufacturing equipment in the United States, the country is unable to obtain top-notch process equipment. Chip production capacity is still expected to be unable to meet the explosive growth of market demand.
