Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent Bulk Purchase Huawei Ascend 950PR for DeepSeek V4, Chip Price Rises 20%

Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent have bulk-purchased hundreds of thousands of Huawei Ascend 950PR chips to prepare for the release of DeepSeek V4. The three companies plan to distribute the model via their cloud services and integrate it into AI applications after its launch. This concentrated purchase has pushed the price of Ascend 950PR up by 20% in recent weeks, and the chip entered mass production this month.

DeepSeek V4 was originally scheduled for release in February this year but was delayed due to migration from Nvidia architecture to Huawei chips (rewriting underlying code and repeated testing). DeepSeek only opened early access to Chinese chip companies like Huawei, excluding Nvidia, giving domestic chips an advantage in software adaptation. Since China banned large tech firms from purchasing Nvidia H20 chips, Huawei has become the main choice for domestic companies to stock up for V4.