160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT accelerators for DeepSeek: China wants self-sufficient AI laboratories

China wants to be self-sufficient in AI. It also wants to lead the manufacturing of key components for data centers that are necessary when inferring models and training them. For this reason, news that CXMT has reached 10% of the global market share in DRAM or that the same company has achieved 90% yield in its DDR5 is less and less surprising. Now, CXMT is just one piece of China’s strategy to become independent from North American technology. Another, clearly, is Huawei.

AI accelerators everywhere

Huawei has been building its own hardware for AI data centers for some time. Now, as he has learned Bloomberg and collect TechPowerUpthe Chinese company would be supplying 160,000 accelerators to DeepSeek, one of the most important AI laboratories in the country. These would be, more specifically, the Huawei Ascend 950DT.

Historically, Huawei has been a leader in networks and consumer electronics. However, due to the sanctions imposed by the United States, the company has had to rethink its strategy at multiple points. Although it has fallen behind on some issues, Huawei has managed to maintain its momentum. Not only has it managed to create its own ecosystem with HarmonyOS, but it has also set its sights on other key sectors, such as AI. In fact, its own chips would be manufactured by TSMC, despite the restrictions of the United States.

What is the Ascend 950DT capable of?

The Ascend 950 family was presented in September 2025, just one year ago. The chip that, according to the sources consulted, DeepSeek will buy in large quantities from Huawei is the 950DT. It is a chip with up to 144 GB of memory and bandwidth of about 4 TB/s. Along with the 950DT, a more modest version was presented, with up to 128 GB of memory and 1.6 TB/s, called 950 PR.

Both chips were presented by the company as the basis of its AI accelerator ecosystem, although at that time it also gave details about the Ascend 960 and 970. Obviously, NVIDIA is still ahead and leading this market with an iron fist, but Huawei continues to improve. The fact that there is a local AI lab ecosystem It also helps, since it does not depend on other countries to market its platforms. Incidentally, all this only reinforces China’s strategy of doing everything on its own.

DeepSeek wants these 160,000 Ascend 950DTs for large-scale inference. He plans to locate them all in the same data center that he has in Mongolia. According to the information, this system will offer 160 ExaFLOPS in FP8 and about 320 ExaFLOPS in FP4. In addition, we would be looking at a platform with 23 PB of HBM memory in total designed to handle millions of queries at the same time without complications.