DeepSeek’s advances have roiled global stock markets and AI players. Now, its influence is spreading quickly at home, with some of China’s biggest tech companies, many of which had been developing their own chatbots, racing to incorporate the open-source model into their own services.
In early February telecoms giant Huawei said it would run DeepSeek on its own computing hardware composed of its Ascend computer processors, which are domestically produced.
Some AI watchers have hailed this as a turning point, as it demonstrates that a high-performing model like DeepSeek no longer requires Nvidia’s most powerful chips to operate.
Starting in late 2022, the Biden Administration imposed several rounds of export controls on China in an effort to deprive the country of technology that Washington fears Beijing could use to make the next generation of weapons and AI systems.
But the success of DeepSeek’s latest R1 AI model, which is said to be trained at a fraction of the cost of established players like ChatGPT, challenged the assumption that cutting off access to advanced chips could successfully stymie China’s progress.
Such is DeepSeek’s fame that leading Chinese AI chipmakers — including Moore Threads, Tencent-backed Enflame, Baidu’s Kunlunxin and Hygon Information Technology — have also announced support for the firm, running the AI model on their own computing chips.Beyond chipmakers, the cloud arms of major Chinese technology companies have also rushed to incorporate DeepSeek’s technology into their offerings.
Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and TikTok parent Bytedance announced they had made Deepseek’s service available through their cloud platforms. The country’s three major telecom operators, along with electronics maker Lenovo and auto brand Geely, have also adopted DeepSeek into their cloud platforms and products.
These major Chinese tech firms, which have dominated the country’s internet scene for more than a decade, began rolling out their own large language models over the past two years since the debut of ChatGPT in late 2022.
Despite having competing products they have welcomed DeepSeek. Su said the primary reason for their adoption is to attract more people and businesses to use their platforms.
Their moves reflect a wider trend. American Big Tech — including Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon — have similarly embraced DeepSeek.
