DEEPSEEK PLANS LARGE HUAWEI CHIP ORDER FOR NEW INNER MONGOLIA DATA CENTRE

Summary from the TLDR Hardware newsletter

DeepSeek is preparing a large order of Huawei AI chips to power a reported one-gigawatt data center in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, which could begin partial operations in late 2027 or early 2028. Nvidia's most capable accelerators can't legally sell into China, leaving Huawei's Ascend family as one of the few domestic options at this scale. DeepSeek has already been tuning models for Ascend, its V4 model launched in April built for the Ascend 950, prompting Chinese cloud providers to order hundreds of thousands of units. Nvidia's Jensen Huang has called this shift a “horrible outcome” for the US, since every model optimized for Ascend chips away at CUDA's ecosystem advantage.