DeepSeek is building an inference chip to cut dependence on Nvidia and Huawei in China’s $50B AI-chip market.
DeepSeek’s chip work is still early, with outside partners and private hiring of chip-design engineers.
The hard part is not drawing a chip, but making it at scale. Advanced foundries and high-bandwidth memory remain chokepoints because U.S. rules restrict Chinese access.
DeepSeek can still gain from a narrower chip built mainly for its own models. A custom inference chip could lower serving costs, reduce power needs, and tighten software-hardware control.
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reuters .com/world/china/chinas-deepseek-developing-its-own-ai-chip-sources-say-2026-07-07/
🇨🇳This is bad news. Now, frontier open source access also will probably no more be available for all. China is preparing to limit foreign access to its strong...