Demand for Huawei’s Ascend 950 AI chips has soared. This comes after DeepSeek released its new V4 artificial intelligence model, which runs on Huawei’s chips. Now, major Chinese internet companies are rushing to place orders, according to three people familiar with the situation.
China’s biggest internet firms, including ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba, are contacting Huawei about new chip orders, say these sources. Companies that focus on cloud computing and renting out graphics processing units (GPUs) are also scrambling to buy these chips.
While Huawei’s 950PR chip performs much better than Nvidia’s H20 (the most powerful chip Nvidia could sell in China before the ban last year), it’s still not as advanced as Nvidia’s H200. The H200 is a more advanced chip that faces regulatory issues and has not yet been shipped to China. This situation gives Huawei a chance to sell its own chips.
The 950PR marks a big win for Huawei. For years, the company struggled to get large orders from China’s tech sector. After samples were given out in January, customer tests went well earlier this year. Companies like ByteDance and Alibaba then planned to place orders, as Reuters reported in March.
The rush for Huawei’s chips shows how DeepSeek’s V4 release last week has greatly increased demand for Chinese-made AI hardware. U.S. export controls still limit access to Nvidia’s most advanced processors. This also confirms the good performance of Huawei’s chips so far.
DeepSeek’s choice to make its V4 model work best with Huawei’s chips is a strategic shift. It moves away from relying on American semiconductor technology and towards China’s own AI gear. This is a top goal for Beijing as it seeks to become a leader in technology.
Last week, Huawei announced that its Ascend supernode infrastructure, which uses the Ascend 950 series chips, will fully support DeepSeek V4 models. The entire Ascend SuperNode product line has been set up for V4 “inference,” which is when a trained AI model answers questions and does tasks.
Among Chinese chipmakers, Huawei’s Ascend 950 series – specifically the 950PR version – is the only domestic chip that supports a method to process AI calculations in a more compressed way. This allows it to do more calculations per second at a lower cost.
Highlighting the demand, Alibaba Cloud’s Bailian platform made DeepSeek V4 available on the day it launched. It offered both the V4-Pro and V4-Flash versions at the same prices as DeepSeek. Tencent Cloud also launched V4 preview services on its TokenHub platform on the same day, using the model on both Chinese servers and its Singapore gateway to serve users worldwide.
The quick launch by major cloud platforms means millions of users and developers can now use V4. This sharply increases the number of AI questions that need processing, and with it, the demand for the chips underneath.
DeepSeek, which is giving developers a 75% discount on its new model until May 5, said V4-Pro prices could drop a lot in the second half of 2026 once Huawei’s Ascend 950 supernodes “ship at scale.” However, the company admitted that there will still be supply limits until production increases. This shows the tight supply of high-end homemade AI chips.
DeepSeek’s V4 has two versions: V4-Pro with 1.6 trillion parameters and V4-Flash with 284 billion parameters. Both can handle a one-million-token context window. These models are available as open-source releases under the MIT license, which lets companies freely use, change, and sell them.
But the production of the 950 chips is expected to fall short of demand. This is because U.S. export rules on advanced chipmaking tools prevent China from getting the latest manufacturing equipment. Huawei planned to ship around 750,000 units of the 950PR this year. Mass production started in April, with full-scale shipments expected in the second half of 2026, according to people familiar with the plans.
