China's domestic AI chips support the rapid deployment of DeepSeek

CITIC Securities Research Report believes that as of February 7, 2025, DeepSeek has completed adaptation with 16 Chinese domestic AI chip companies (such as Huawei Ascend, Muxi, Tianshu Zhixin, etc.). Huawei Ascend uses its self-developed reasoning acceleration engine to enable the DeepSeek model to achieve a deployment effect comparable to that of high-end GPUs on Ascend hardware. CITIC Securities believes that DeepSeek's low-cost characteristics (training costs are only 3%-5% of industry giants) have lowered the entry threshold for enterprises, and the substantial growth in demand for reasoning is expected to promote the application of domestic AI chips in reasoning scenarios, reducing dependence on overseas hardware to a certain extent. As the leader of domestic AI chips, Huawei Ascend has helped the three major operators, iFlytek, etc. complete the Wanka cluster through Ascend 910B in the past, and is expected to further help the development of domestic AI with 910C in 2025.