DeepSeek plans to deploy more than 160,000 of Huawei Technologies' Ascend 950DT accelerators at a data center under construction in Inner Mongolia, a cluster that would rank among the largest built on Huawei Technologies chips1,2.
The order, reported by Bloomberg's Mackenzie Hawkins citing sources, pairs China's most prominent open-weight AI lab with the country's leading domestic chip supplier at a scale that would constitute a major expansion of DeepSeek's compute footprint.
The Ascend 950DT is Huawei Technologies' top AI accelerator. A cluster exceeding 160,000 units would represent a substantial concentration of domestic silicon for training or inference workloads.
ANALYSIS The procurement is notable given DeepSeek's concurrent presence on NVIDIA hardware. NVIDIA's Dynamo project recently published an experimental snapshot with inference recipes for a DeepSeek model on NVIDIA systems.
The scale of the order, if fulfilled, would make the Inner Mongolia facility one of the larger single-site AI clusters globally, and a landmark deployment for Huawei Technologies' Ascend line in a production AI research environment.