Huawei prepares 160,000 Ascend 950DT chips for DeepSeek

DeepSeek has reportedly placed an order for 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT accelerators as Chinese AI labs increase purchases of domestic chips. Huawei previously outlined plans for new chips and rack-scale systems aimed at meeting local AI demand, and the reported DeepSeek order signals that large deployments are beginning to take shape.

The Ascend 950DT includes 144 GB of memory based on Huawei’s own HBM design, with bandwidth of nearly 4 TB/s. Each chip can reach about one PetaFLOP of FP8 peak compute, or about two PetaFLOPS of FP4 performance.

DeepSeek plans to use the chips for large-scale inference in a single data center located in Inner Mongolia. The full system is expected to deliver a peak of 160 ExaFLOPS at FP8 or about 320 ExaFLOPS at FP4 precision, alongside about 23 PB of total HBM memory to support concurrent customer workloads.