DeepSeek Targets Year-End Pretraining Run on Huawei Ascend 950DT Chips

DeepSeek plans to begin large-scale pretraining on Huawei’s Ascend 950DT AI chips as early as the end of 2026, putting China’s domestic accelerators to a major test on a demanding model-training job.

A full run may require more than 10,000 chips operating continuously for several weeks, with the start date dependent on testing progress. The deployment would make the 950DT a large-scale test of China’s alternatives to Nvidia.

Huawei engineers are working from DeepSeek’s offices and folding model-training needs into designs for next-generation chips. DeepSeek released TileLang, a toolkit adapted for Ascend 950, on Sept. 30. DeepSeek is also seeking more Nvidia chips.

Huawei plans to direct most of its Ascend 960DT supply to DeepSeek when that chip is introduced in the first quarter of 2027. Testing will determine whether the 950DT pretraining run begins before year-end.