Two DeepSeek headlines landed within hours of each other on Monday, and read side by side they tell you pretty much everything about where the US-China AI race is heading: two separate stacks, built by two separate camps, with less and less overlap every month.
Let's start in Hangzhou. According to The Information, DeepSeek has gone well beyond being a Huawei customer and is now effectively a co-designer of Huawei's next-gen silicon. Huawei engineers have reportedly been stationed at DeepSeek's offices for an extended period, folding the AI lab's requests and suggestions directly into chip design decisions. In return, Huawei plans to hand DeepSeek most of the supply of its Ascend 960DT training chip when it launches next year. And on the software side, both companies have been using the open-source programming language TileLang as an alternative to Nvidia's CUDA, with DeepSeek's models now largely handled by TileLang running on Huawei chips.
None of this should come as a surprise. Back in September, when DeepSeek said it aimed to deploy over 160,000 Huawei AI chips, we wrote that DeepSeek's 160,000 Huawei Order Is A Real Threat To Nvidia In 2027. A few weeks later, on Sept 30, DeepSeek open-sourced an Ascend port of TileLang along with Ascend versions of its DeepGEMM and DeepEP libraries, explicitly crediting Huawei and touting a jointly optimized 128-chip Ascend 950 "supernode." Meanwhile Huawei pulled the launch of the Ascend 960DT forward to the first quarter of 2027, three quarters ahead of schedule.
What's new in Monday's repo
