Chinese AI labs are increasingly ordering domestic AI accelerators, and one of the leading AI labs, DeepSeek, has reportedly placed an order for 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips. Late last year, Huawei revealed that the company is preparing a series of chips and rack-scale solutions to meet domestic AI demand, and now we are seeing large orders starting to materialize. For reference, the Huawei Ascend 950DT AI accelerator has a memory capacity of 144 GB, built on Huawei's own HBM memory design. This in-house solution delivers a bandwidth of nearly 4 TB/s, aligning perfectly with Huawei's vision. The chip can achieve about one PetaFLOP of FP8 peak compute, or about two PetaFLOPS of FP4.

DeepSeek, one of the leading Chinese AI labs, will use Huawei's Ascend 950DT chips for large-scale inference operations and will deploy them in a single data center located in Inner Mongolia. The overall system will deliver a peak of 160 ExaFLOPS at FP8 or about 320 ExaFLOPS at FP4 precision. The system will also have about 23 PB of total HBM memory, meaning that the large-scale inferencing operations will be able to serve thousands of customers concurrently without any issues.The Ascend 950DT is interconnected by a new Lingqu interconnect protocol and optical links designed to connect hundreds of thousands of Ascend 950 cards. Huawei can pack up to 8,192 chips per Atlas 950 SuperPoD, which can scale up to 64 Atlas SuperPoDs for a total of 524,288 accelerators. However, since DeepSeek only ordered 160,000 Ascend AI accelerators, scaling and reaching that theoretical limit won't be an issue.