DeepSeek V4 Confirmed Running on Huawei Ascend 950PR — First Frontier Model Without NVIDIA

Reuters / The Information·high signal

Reuters confirmed April 4 that DeepSeek V4 (1T parameter MoE, ~37B active) will run entirely on Huawei's Ascend 950PR chips, making it the first frontier AI model trained and served on non-NVIDIA silicon. DeepSeek withheld early V4 access from US chipmakers while giving Chinese suppliers tuning time. Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent have ordered hundreds of thousands of Huawei chips ahead of the late-April release. If competitive at $0.30/MTok, this breaks NVIDIA's monopoly on frontier inference.