DeepSeek gives China’s chipmakers leg up in race for affordable AI

The rise of DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence (AI) models is seen providing some Chinese chipmakers such as Huawei a better chance to compete in the domestic market against more powerful US processors.

Huawei and its Chinese peers have for years struggled to match Nvidia in building top-end chips that could compete with the US firm’s products for training models, a process where data is fed to algorithms to help them learn to make accurate decisions.

However, DeepSeek’s models, which focus on “inference,” or when an AI model produces conclusions, optimise computational efficiency rather than relying solely on raw processing power.