DeepSeek, Huawei partner on AI chip programming tools

Chinese AI firm DeepSeek said Wednesday it has partnered with Huawei Technologies to develop programming tools for Huawei's Ascend AI chips, as Chinese technology companies seek alternatives to Nvidia's ecosystem.

Chinese AI firm DeepSeek said Wednesday it has partnered with Huawei Technologies to develop programming tools for Huawei’s Ascend AI chips, as Chinese technology companies seek alternatives to Nvidia’s ecosystem.

DeepSeek said in a post on its official WeChat account that it was open-sourcing programming infrastructure for Huawei’s Ascend platform, including a high-level programming language called TileLang and related compute and communication libraries.

DeepSeek said the goal was to build an “independent, self-controlled GPU software ecosystem” and described TileLang as a simpler programming model than Nvidia’s CUDA.

The company said TileLang was designed to make programming easier while allowing developers to make full use of the underlying hardware’s performance. It also said the language could improve development efficiency and simplify code logic.

Huawei provided support for the development of the programming infrastructure, and the two companies have jointly advanced a “supernode” solution based on 128 Ascend 950 chips, according to DeepSeek.

The announcement comes about two weeks after Huawei unveiled its next-generation AI processors and supernode computing systems, saying it expected its AI systems to see wider use for model training next year.