China's DeepSeek Pushes to Develop Own AI Chips, Aiming to Reduce Reliance on Nvidia and Huawei

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek is working on developing its own AI chips, a move that could reduce its reliance on Nvidia and Huawei if successful, Reuters reported on July 7, citing multiple sources.

According to the report, DeepSeek has been working to enter the race for proprietary AI chips for about a year and has been in discussions with chip design, foundry, and memory companies.

Sources explained that DeepSeek has increased its hiring of chip design engineers over the past few months, recruiting technical talent through unofficial channels rather than posting job openings on recruitment platforms.

Reuters noted that global AI developers have been seeking to strengthen hardware control and reduce dependence on Nvidia by securing their own chips, and that DeepSeek is set to join this trend.

Last month, U.S.-based OpenAI unveiled its first custom inference chip, "Jalapeno," developed in collaboration with Broadcom.

Anthropic, the developer of Claude, is also considering the development of its own AI chips.

Unlike other global AI developers, DeepSeek is also facing U.S. export control measures.

As Chinese companies have been unable to purchase Nvidia's cutting-edge chips due to U.S. restrictions, Chinese authorities have been pressuring domestic tech firms to develop "domestic alternatives."

DeepSeek has officially been using lower-end Nvidia chips and chips from China's Huawei.

In particular, the company stated that it used lower-end chips, such as the "H800"—a version of Nvidia's chip with reduced computing power for the Chinese market—to create its inference model "R1," which caused a global stir in January of last year.

Since then, DeepSeek has gradually increased its reliance on Huawei chips.

Reuters pointed out that while Huawei has captured half of the $50 billion (approximately 75 trillion won) domestic AI chip market in China thanks to U.S. bans on advanced semiconductor exports to the country, its market dominance is already weakening as companies like Alibaba and Baidu develop their own AI chips and increase their market share.

Under these circumstances, Reuters predicted that Huawei could face even greater difficulties as DeepSeek also makes a strategic shift toward developing its own chips.

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※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.