DeepSeek plans 160,000 Huawei Ascend chips for Inner Mongolia site

Bloomberg reported on 4 September 2026 that DeepSeek plans to deploy at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips at a data centre it is building in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia. Bloomberg said the information came from people familiar with the plans; neither DeepSeek nor Huawei commented.

The order would create one of the largest known clusters of Huawei AI chips anywhere, according to the report.

DeepSeek is targeting about 1 gigawatt of capacity at the site, built partly by itself and partly leased, with the 160,000 chips filling only part of that capacity, Bloomberg reported. A July report said part of the site would come online by late 2027 or early 2028.

The chips are intended for inference, meaning serving users running existing models, rather than training new ones, according to tech-ish. DeepSeek still trains its models on Nvidia hardware, though its V4 model was tuned for the Ascend 950 chip. The company is also reportedly developing its own inference chip with SMIC.

The Ascend 950DT has 144 gigabytes of high-bandwidth memory and 4.0 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth, according to XenoSpectrum. At an estimated $16,000 per chip, the order would cost around $2.56 billion, an outside estimate cited in the report showed. The 160,000-chip order is close to 20 of Huawei's Atlas 950 SuperPoDs, each of which contains 8,192 chips.

Filling the order depends on how quickly Huawei can manufacture chips under US export controls, and could take more than a year, according to the report.

US export controls have kept Nvidia's most advanced chips out of China. One forecast cited in the report put Nvidia's share of China's AI chip market falling from 40% to 8% in 2026.