Chinese AI Firms Push Beyond Nvidia: DeepSeek Bets on Huawei

DeepSeek said for the first time that its latest model has been optimized to run on Huawei chips for inference, a measurable break from Nvidia hardware. Business Times Singapore reports that the announcement came days before Trump and Xi were due to meet in Beijing. DeepSeek still relied on Nvidia chips to train its current model, according to two semiconductor industry sources cited by BT. Huawei has said it plans to release a training chip this year, while flagging that catching up to Nvidia's current generation will take another year.

The shift is not happening in isolation. Wei Sun, principal AI analyst at Counterpoint Research in Beijing, told BT that US export controls "are not freezing China's AI development. They are forcing China to build an alternative stack." Firms including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI are designing systems around US restrictions rather than waiting for them to lift.

The Details

Model: DeepSeek's latest, optimized for Huawei chips on inference

Training stack: still Nvidia-based, per two semiconductor industry sources cited by BT

Huawei roadmap: training chip this year, parity with Nvidia's current chips still a year out

Manufacturing constraint: SMIC, which produces some Huawei chips, has struggled to scale yield. Chips are more defect-prone and power-hungry than foreign equivalents

Huawei workaround: stringing together large numbers of weaker chips to match more advanced processors

Policy backdrop: Trump granted Nvidia permission to sell the H200 to China after Busan, but Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told a Senate Appropriations Committee no H200s have shipped, and Nvidia said in regulatory filings it has yet to generate H200 revenue from China

Source: Business Times Singapore

Embodied AI funding adds a parallel data point

On the same day, Yicai reported that three Chinese embodied AI firms closed new rounds together worth hundreds of millions of US dollars. Lumos Robotics raised several hundred million yuan across Series A1 and A2 led by Mitsubishi Electric, lifting total funding to nearly 1 billion yuan (about 137.2 million US dollars). Vbot raised nearly 500 million yuan in a pre-Series A for a home-use robot dog. Uncharted Dynamics raised several million dollars in a seed round led by K2VC.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has warned for years that strict export controls would split the global AI market into Chinese chips for Chinese systems and American chips for the rest. The DeepSeek-Huawei pairing is the clearest product-level signal yet that the split is moving from rhetoric into shipped code.

Sources: Business Times Singapore, Yicai Global