❯ DeepSeek and Huawei open-source Ascend programming tools, filling a key gap for training on Chinese chips

TileLang comes to AscendAccording to Reuters, DeepSeek says it has partnered with Huawei to develop programming tools for Huawei’s Ascend chips, including the open-source TileLang, seen as an alternative to Nvidia’s CUDA. On September 30 DeepSeek open-sourced the Ascend versions along with supporting compute and communication libraries, six tools in total that previously existed only for Nvidia GPUs.

Chips need software to be usableMuch of Nvidia’s moat comes from CUDA: developers use it to write the low-level programs that run efficiently on GPUs, tying vast amounts of AI code to Nvidia. TileLang is a Python-like language for writing these low-level “operators,” and it was used for most of the operators DeepSeek used to train V4. DeepSeek also said it optimized for 128-card “supernodes.”

Training without Nvidia's permissionUnder US export controls, Chinese AI firms struggle to buy Nvidia’s most advanced chips, and Huawei’s Ascend is the main substitute, but it has been used more for inference because large-scale training tools were immature. Some analysts say DeepSeek’s release isn’t yet enough to fully reproduce a frontier training run but comes surprisingly close. Other Chinese model makers that reuse it could skip a lot of detours.

▪ SIGNALThe hard part of chip independence was never just making the chip but getting developers to write code for it, and DeepSeek is solving that toughest software problem for Huawei.