The Chinese technology champion Huawei has become the main competitor of Nvidia in China for inference chips. The Financial Times has previously reported that it has been working with AI companies, including Deepseek, to adapt trained models in the NVIDIA GPUs to execute inference in its Ascend chips.
“Huawei is improving. They have an opening since the government tells the big technology companies that they need to buy their chips and use them for inference, ”said a semiconductor investor in Beijing.
The announcement that triggered the spasm of the stock market on Monday over Nvidia occurred as the United States moves to affirm its leadership in the China, and while the US technological companies. UU. They prepare to inform their latest profits. The president of the United States, Donald Trump, said Depseek “should be a attention call for our industries that we need to be focused on competing to win.”
In December, Depseek launched the V3 model, which said it was comparable to those of Openai and Google, but trained it in a fraction of the budget with $ 5.6 million. The Chinese company said it used only 2,048 Nvidia chips, which could have been obtained without violating US export controls that have eliminated China’s access to the latest products of US chips manufacturers. UU.
Then, last week, he announced his latest R1 model, a “reasoning model” that is comparable to OPENAI O1.
In addition to investors, Deepseek engineers were able to unlock a higher performance by writing code without depending on the Cuda Software Platform in Nvidia, which is considered widely crucial for the mastery of the development of Silicon Valley chips of the development of AI.
“Deepseek has leveled the playing field,” said Stephen Yiu, Blue Whale Growth investment director, the investment fund backed by billionaire Peter Hargreaves, which last month reduced his exposure to the magnificent group of the large US technology companies About his concerns about his concerns enormous expense in AI.