❯ DeepSeek to run inference on 160,000 Ascend 950DT chips in Ulanqab while training stays on Nvidia

the deploymentDeepSeek plans to install at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT accelerators in a large data center under construction in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, for model inference, according to reports; training remains primarily on Nvidia accelerators. Neither company commented. On funding, the company closed roughly 50 billion yuan in June 2026 and has since restarted another round, with infrastructure expansion a major use of proceeds.

the distinctionThe easiest thing to get wrong here is what the chips are for. Huawei markets the 950DT as a training chip, but DeepSeek currently has no plan to train on them. A 160,000-chip cluster designated for inference only means domestic silicon’s role inside this lab is serving already-trained models, not exploring the capability ceiling. A week earlier, Z.ai’s disclosed 100,000 domestic chips were likewise for inference.

a division of laborA clear split is settling in across China’s frontier labs: training stays on Nvidia, inference moves to domestic chips. The practical hit to Nvidia is smaller than it looks — inference volume tracks user growth, while training-card purchases determine the capability ceiling, and that is the real moat. What domestic compute has to prove next is specific: whether it can carry one complete frontier pretraining run. Until then, numbers like 100,000 and 160,000 speak to capacity, not capability.

▪ SIGNALTraining on Nvidia, inference on domestic silicon — where that line sits is the real progress bar for China’s compute self-sufficiency.