Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent Bulk Purchase Huawei Ascend 950PR for DeepSeek V4, Chip Prices Rise 20%

According to monitoring by 1M AI News, Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent have made bulk purchases of the Ascend 950PR from Huawei, with a total order size in the hundreds of thousands of units. The three companies plan to distribute this model through their cloud services and integrate it into AI applications after the release of DeepSeek V4. This round of concentrated procurement has driven the price of the Ascend 950PR up by 20% in recent weeks, with mass production of the chip starting this month. Meanwhile, DeepSeek has only opened an early access window to Chinese chip companies like Huawei before the release of V4, rejecting participation from NVIDIA. Typically, chip companies are granted early access rights before the release of large models to prepare supporting software. This means that domestic chips have an advantage in software adaptation before the public release of V4. Reuters previously reported on NVIDIA’s rejection. DeepSeek has been collaborating with Huawei and chip design company Cambricon to advance the hardware adaptation work for V4. The release of V4 was originally planned for February this year, but the need to rewrite the underlying code and conduct repeated testing to migrate the model from NVIDIA architecture to Huawei chips has been one of the main reasons for the delay. Currently, DeepSeek is also developing two additional variants of V4, each optimized for different capability dimensions, all designed for Chinese chips. NVIDIA’s H20 has previously been widely used by Chinese companies to run DeepSeek models, but the Chinese government has banned large tech companies from procuring this chip. It remains unclear whether the more powerful H200 will enter the Chinese market. With extremely limited options, Huawei is almost the only outlet for domestic companies to stock up ahead of the V4 release.