Few model makers are leaning into domestic silicon as hard as DeepSeek. Sources tracking its infrastructure plans describe a new Inner Mongolia data center stocked with at least 160,000 Ascend 950DT accelerators from Huawei, a deployment that would rank among the largest ever built around the vendor’s AI chips.
Bloomberg first reported the plan. The AI developer intends to use the processors for inference, running its models to respond to users, and currently has no plans to train on them. The deployment schedule depends on Huawei’s production capacity, the people said.
The planned chips would cover only part of the facility’s eventual capacity. The broader project targets power consumption on a gigawatt scale, putting it in the same league as the largest US data-center campuses being built for AI workloads.
The Inner Mongolia buildout underscores how Chinese AI labs are deepening their reliance on domestic silicon as US export controls block access to Nvidia’s most advanced chips. DeepSeek has emerged as one of the largest buyers of Huawei’s Ascend line, and the reported cluster would mark a major scale-up of that relationship.
Timing and scale remain reported plans rather than a completed deployment, and Huawei has not publicly confirmed production capacity for the 950DT at the volumes DeepSeek is said to need. The story fits a broader pattern of Chinese tech giants and AI startups racing to secure domestic compute as the country pushes for self-reliance in AI infrastructure.
