Chinese chip manufacturers and cloud service providers are quickly jumping on board with the local DeepSeek technology.
Chinese companies, ranging from chip manufacturers to cloud service providers, are quickly jumping on board to back DeepSeek's AI models, leading analysts to call it a "turning point" for the industry.
Moore Threads and Hygon Information Technology, which produces AI chips and aims to rival Nvidia, announced on Monday that their computing clusters and accelerators would support DeepSeek's R1 and V3 models.
"We pay tribute to DeepSeek," Moore Threads headlined its post on WeChat, adding that progress by the firm's models using domestically made graphic processing units (GPU) could "set on fire," China's AI sector.
On Saturday, Huawei Technologies, which also has its own AI chip lineup, revealed it was collaborating with AI infrastructure startup SiliconFlow to make DeepSeek's models available to users on its Ascend cloud service.
They mentioned that the performance of these models was on par with those running on top-tier global chips.
The news of Huawei integrating DeepSeek's models with its Ascend chips was described as a "turning point" by Bernstein analysts in a note on Sunday.
"DeepSeek demonstrates that competitive large language models (LLM) can be deployed on China's 'good enough' chips, easing reliance on cutting-edge U.S. hardware", they noted, referencing Ascend and upcoming chips from Cambricon and Hygon.
Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent's cloud divisions have also announced that they are offering DeepSeek's models through their platforms.
Last month, DeepSeek introduced a free AI assistant that claims to use less data at a much lower cost than existing services.
Within days, its app surpassed U.S. competitor ChatGPT in downloads on Apple's App Store, causing a global dip in tech stocks.
Earlier, the company gained attention in the global AI community with a research paper in December stating that training DeepSeek-V3 required under $6 million in computing power from Nvidia's H800 chips, compared to the billions spent by tech giants like Meta and Microsoft.
China is celebrating its success, making the startup from Hangzhou and its founder, Liang Wenfeng, into pop culture icons.
Meanwhile, Microsoft and Amazon have begun to provide DeepSeek's models through their cloud services. However, countries like Italy and the Netherlands are either blocking or looking into DeepSeek's AI app due to privacy concerns.