DeepSeek to deploy 160,000 Huawei Ascend chips for inference as training stays on Nvidia

Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports that DeepSeek plans to deploy at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT accelerators in a data centre under construction in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, one of the largest Huawei AI chip clusters known. DeepSeek and Huawei have not commented. The purpose is clear. The chips will run already-trained models, … Read more

Apple hands the CEO job to a hardware man as Nvidia moves the AI war onto the desktop

Two announcements landed within hours of each other in early September, and together they frame the next fight in AI: who defines consumer computing once models run on the desk instead of in the cloud. On 1 September Tim Cook stepped down as Apple chief executive to become executive chairman, handing the company to John … Read more

Car-grade chip maker hands AUBO a 70 TOPS robot brain

Black Sesame Technologies has delivered the first batch of its Aura Devkit to collaborative robot maker AUBO, the two companies said, deepening a tie that now spans project bids, joint research and commercial supply. Black Sesame Aura compute module from the SesameX embodied-AI platform (Source: Gasgoo) A car chip moves into the robot The Aura … Read more

US weighs letting Apple buy Chinese memory chips, for China-market devices only

On 24 August, media reports said the US government is considering approving Apple’s purchase of products from Chinese memory makers, in a move to ease the storage supply pressure the company currently faces. According to the reports, Apple has already been testing DRAM and NAND chips from two Chinese memory suppliers. If later cleared for … Read more

Nvidia tells customers AI server prices will rise more than 15 per cent

On 23 August, Bloomberg reported on Saturday that some of Nvidia’s largest customers have been told that servers containing its artificial-intelligence chips will in many cases rise more than 15 per cent, because memory-chip costs are surging. The price increase takes effect from the start of next year and covers systems built on the flagship … Read more

A 22-year Huawei veteran is building ‘LPU+’, and just closed another funding round

Before Groq’s LPU rode Nvidia’s spotlight to fame, Yuanchuan Micro founder and CEO Yang Bin was already sketching an inference chip. LeiFeng Net has learned exclusively that the LPU start-up has closed a several-hundred-million-yuan Pre-A round led by IDG Capital, with Futong Capital, JK Venture, Shangqi Capital, Shunxi Fund and Xuhui Sci-Tech Innovation Investment joining. … Read more

They are all called 3D chips, but three different businesses hide under the label

A new wave of chip funding is clustering under one label, “3D stacking”, but the companies behind it are solving three different problems. Near-memory computing, compute-in-memory and 3D near-memory sound alike and some have raised about 1 billion yuan across two rounds, yet their markets and proof points diverge. The first route recombines logic chiplets, … Read more

Alibaba’s earnings show who really profits from the AI boom: the shovel sellers

Alibaba’s latest results make one awkward point: while the spotlight sits on model and app layers, the shortest-term AI profit is in cloud and silicon. In the first quarter of fiscal 2027, the April to June 2026 period, Alibaba Cloud revenue reached 48.74 billion yuan, about 6.8 billion dollars, up 45 per cent year on … Read more

Huawei Ascend 950 breaks through after the TSMC cutoff

China’s AI has posted a run of breakthroughs this year, from DeepSeek’s DeepSeek-V4 series to Moonshot’s Kimi K3, a 3-trillion-parameter open-source model, and Zhipu’s GLM-5.3, whose coding ability approaches top closed models. Behind the models sits compute. Despite US limits on advanced AI chips and semiconductor equipment, domestic compute such as Huawei’s Ascend has broken … Read more