What's Huawei got to do with DeepSeek?

DeepSeek tested the full capability of 910C AI Chips and DeepSeek's R1 and other models are suddenly on every major Cloud provider.

Good Morning,

I noticed a Huawei connection with DeepSeek recently that I think deserves some brief info and discussion.

Last week we found out that Chinese tech giant Huawei appears to have exceeded expectations in 2024, reporting annual revenue of over 860 billion yuan ($118.27 billion). With all the Western sanctions on them, in theory that should not be possible.

Last week there were also some rumblings that DeepSeek R1 Is reportedly running inference on Huawei’s Ascend 910C AI Chips. DeepSeek found they were 60% as good as Nvidia’s famous H100s.

Huawei’s Earnings suggest that their 2024 revenue was a 22% increase in revenue from 2023, and the fastest growth since a 32% increase in 2016, according to CNBC calculations of publicly released figures. While the U.S. sees export controls critical in slowing down China’s capability to keep up in bleeding edge models, Huawei’s role in all of this remains huge.

Huawei still remains a darkhorse of Global Tech

Deep Dive: Is Huawei like China’s Nvidia plus Google?

For DeepSeek, born in 2023, that its portfolio of AI compute hardware includes Huawei's Ascend AI Chips is of course not surprising.