China’s DeepSeek developing its own AI chip, increase hiring of engineers

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.