China’s DeepSeek developing its own AI chip

Chinese startup DeepSeek is developing its own AI chip, according to three people familiar with the matter, a push that could reduce its reliance on Nvidia ​and Huawei chips, which it has depended on to train ​and run its globally popular models.

The chip is designed for inference – the stage of AI computing in which a trained ​model generates responses for users – rather than for training new models, the sources said.