Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has had to delay the release of its highly anticipated R2 model.
The reason appeared to be technical problems that prevented effective training on Ascend chips from Huawei. The incident is forcing the company to revert to Nvidia technology, a clear blow to China’s ambitions to become independent of US components in the key artificial intelligence sector.
The Financial Times reports that persistent performance problems with Ascend chips have forced DeepSeek to change its strategy.
The company opted for a hybrid solution: Nvidia’s powerful chips will be used for the extremely computationally demanding process of training the model, while Huawei’s chips will be used for less taxing inference (inference), i.e. the generation of a response by an already trained model.
This division of tasks, while pragmatic, highlights that Chinese alternatives still lag behind US leaders in the most advanced applications. The R2 was originally scheduled for release in May.
The DeepSeek case illustrates the broader challenge facing Chinese technology companies. On the one hand, Beijing is pushing for the use of domestic solutions, such as Ascend chips, in an effort to build technological sovereignty and raise concerns about the security of US technologies.
On the other hand, US sanctions, although recently relaxed in the case of Nvidia’s H20 chips, still restrict access to the most efficient components from the US. Companies find themselves trapped between political directives and the technological reality that US chips remain the most efficient tool.
Despite the political support for Huawei, it is Nvidia’s H20 chips that remain the de facto standard in the Chinese AI market. It was on them that DeepSeek trained its previous groundbreaking R1 model, as did giants such as ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba.
Problems with implementing a domestic alternative put DeepSeek at a competitive disadvantage at a time when rivals are launching new innovations. The delayed launch of R2 is expected in the coming weeks, but the incident calls into question the real pace of China’s hardware AI revolution.
