DeepSeek Plans Major Huawei Chip Order in New AI Data Center

DeepSeek plans to install at least 160,000 Huawei AI chips at a data center in Inner Mongolia, Northern China, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the situation.

The project would support China’s push to replace Nvidia silicon in light of U.S. chip restrictions. DeepSeek would mainly use the Huawei chips to run AI models after training, a process known as inference, according to Bloomberg. DeepSeek’s V4 model has already been optimised to run on Huawei hardware. The planned cluster would be comparable with large U.S. AI data centers by chip count. However, Huawei’s chips are less powerful than the Nvidia ones, which DeepSeek still uses for model training.

The chip purchase plan comes as DeepSeek seeks $7.4 billion in a second funding round, largely to finance research and computing infrastructure. The company spent 11 billion yuan on AI infrastructure in the first seven months of 2026, up from 1.2 billion yuan in all of 2025, The Information reported. Most of that spending went toward renting servers and buying chips and other equipment.

Securing enough Huawei chips, however, remains a challenge. Shortages of advanced memory and other key parts could limit Huawei’s production to the low hundreds of thousands of chips this year. DeepSeek may have to wait more than a year for its full order as Huawei also needs to supply other customers, according to Bloomberg.