It was reported that DeepSeek ordered 160 thousand Huawei Ascend 950DT artificial intelligence chips for the 1 GW capacity data center it will establish in Inner Mongolia. The total value of the agreement is given as 2.56 billion dollars in the news. It is claimed that the price difference was effective in the company choosing Huawei hardware instead of Nvidia H20. DeepSeek and Huawei have not officially confirmed the order amount.
According to the information provided, Nvidia H20 is offered at almost twice the price of the Ascend 950DT for similar use. US export restrictions also limit the scope of products Nvidia can ship to China. Going towards domestic supplier can reduce DeepSeek’s hardware cost when building the large-scale cluster. On the other hand, software compatibility and porting applications from the Nvidia ecosystem constitute a separate engineering burden.
According to Huawei’s official road map, Ascend 950DT offers 144 GB HiZQ 2.0 memory and 4 TB memory access bandwidth per second. The inter-chip connection capacity is announced as 2 TB per second. The product was planned to be available in the fourth quarter of 2026. This technical framework aims to combine multiple chips into a single artificial intelligence training cluster.
Ascend 950DT can scale within Huawei’s Atlas 950 SuperPoD system. 8 EFLOPS FP8 processing power is stated for the system containing 8,192 chips in full configuration. This value refers to the capacity of the entire SuperPoD cluster, not a single 950DT chip. It was not disclosed in which cluster order the DeepSeek order would be used.
Deliveries are expected to take more than a year
The order of 160 thousand units is not expected to be delivered at once. The news states that the shipment will be spread over a period of more than a year. This period can allow for gradual commissioning of the new data center and adaptation of the software stack in stages. Production capacity and high-bandwidth memory supply will be the key variables of the schedule.
If confirmed, the deal would be one of the biggest examples of Nvidia’s decline in the AI accelerator market in China. Huawei, on the other hand, gains an advantage by offering a domestic option ranging from chip to network connection and cluster system. However, the order price, H20 price comparison and the exact capacity of the data center are based on claims reported by news sources for now. Disclosure from the parties is required to verify these details.
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