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.

Source: TokenPost