DeepSeek and Huawei Release Open-Source Tools to Challenge Nvidia's CUDA Dominance in China
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DeepSeek and Huawei release open-source Ascend AI programming tools to reduce reliance on Nvidia CUDA ecosystem -- tools include compute and communication libraries, as well as Ascend support for TileLang
Chinese AI company DeepSeek has released open-source programming tools developed in partnership with Huawei, for the company's Ascend AI chips, as part of efforts to reduce reliance on Nvidia's software and hardware ecosystem. According to a September 30 Reuters report, the release includes
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Huawei boss claims homegrown AI chip sales top Nvidia in China
The Trump administration's export control policies governing the sale of AI accelerators to China haven't stopped homegrown Huawei from filling the void. In a Q&A-style release this week, the company's rotating chairman Eric Xu claimed that its Ascend line of neural processing units (NPUs) had
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DeepSeek partners with Huawei to develop chip programming tools, reducing reliance on Nvidia
HONG KONG, Sept 30 (Reuters) - Chinese AI firm DeepSeek said on Wednesday it has partnered with Huawei Technologies to develop programming tools for Huawei's Ascend chips, the latest sign of Chinese tech firms deepening ties as they seek alternatives to the Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab
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DeepSeek and Huawei Target a Key Source of Nvidia's A.I. Dominance
In China's push for self-reliance in artificial intelligence, DeepSeek and Huawei have teamed up to develop software tools for advanced chips. In China's latest push to reduce its dependence on American artificial intelligence technology, DeepSeek, one of the country's leading A.I. companies,
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DeepSeek open-sources Huawei Ascend tools as a CUDA alternative
The free tools include six software modules that mirror DeepSeek's earlier releases for Nvidia chips. DeepSeek now uses TileLang as its core tool for work on artificial general intelligence. DeepSeek has open-sourced a set of programming tools for Huawei's Ascend AI chips. They include a version
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DeepSeek: DeepSeek partners with Huawei to develop chip programming tools, reducing reliance on Nvidia
Chinese AI firm DeepSeek said on Wednesday it has partnered with Huawei Technologies to develop programming tools for Huawei's Ascend chips, the latest sign of Chinese tech firms deepening ties as they seek alternatives to the Nvidia ecosystem. In a post on its official WeChat account, DeepSeek
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Nvidia's Software Advantage Under Threat by DeepSeek-Huawei Alliance - NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)
Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) faces a fresh challenge to one of its biggest competitive advantages after DeepSeek teamed up with Huawei Technologies to build open-source software for Huawei's Ascend AI chips. The effort targets CUDA, the software platform used to program Nvidia's GPUs, which has
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DeepSeek, Huawei Build 128-Chip AI System to Challenge Nvidia
Chinese AI firm DeepSeek partnered with Huawei on September 30 to build programming tools for Huawei's Ascend AI chips. The collaboration targets China's growing need for Nvidia alternatives, using open-source software and optimized libraries for Ascend processors. DeepSeek announced the
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DeepSeek partners with Huawei to develop chip programming tools, reducing reliance on Nvidia
HONG KONG, Sept 30 (Reuters) - Chinese AI firm DeepSeek said on Wednesday it has partnered with Huawei Technologies to develop programming tools for Huawei's Ascend chips, the latest sign of Chinese tech firms deepening ties as they seek alternatives to the Nvidia ecosystem. In a post on its
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DeepSeek and Huawei have released open-source programming tools for Ascend AI chips, including the TileLang language and compute libraries. The partnership aims to reduce reliance on Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem as China pushes for technological self-sufficiency in AI development amid ongoing US export controls.
DeepSeek and Huawei Launch Open-Source Programming Tools for Ascend Chips
Chinese AI company DeepSeek has released open-source programming tools developed in partnership with Huawei for the company's Ascend AI chips, marking a significant step in China's efforts to reduce reliance on Nvidia's software and hardware ecosystem
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. The release includes open-source libraries for AI computation and chip-to-chip communication, as well as Ascend support for the high-level programming language TileLang3
. DeepSeek says the tools are intended to simplify programming while enabling developers to fully leverage the hardware's performance, with Huawei providing full support during development1
. The partnership brings together two companies playing central but different roles in China's efforts to narrow the AI technology gap with the United States4
.TileLang Offers Alternative to Nvidia's CUDA Ecosystem
DeepSeek presented its work with Huawei as a potential alternative to CUDA, positioning TileLang as offering "a simpler programming model" than Nvidia's CUDA platform
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. The company emphasized that building a successful AI ecosystem requires specialized software that must be "universal, easy to program, and still capable of reaching the hardware's full performance potential"4
. DeepSeek first tested TileLang on older Nvidia chips and now uses the language as its "core tool" for work on artificial general intelligence5
. The September 30 update adds native support for Ascend 950, including code generation, automatic scheduling, and synchronization1
. Nvidia's CUDA platform has an estimated four million developers worldwide, representing a significant competitive moat4
.Compute and Communication Libraries Optimize Ascend Performance
The released libraries include DeepGEMM-Ascend, which handles matrix multiplication and other calculations used in DeepSeek's models, supporting BF16, FP8, and FP4 operations
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. DeepEP-Ascend handles communication for training and inference, including routing data to different experts in mixture-of-experts models and combining their outputs1
. The two companies worked together to optimize computation and communication on a supernode system built around 128 Ascend 950 chips, addressing requirements for running large AI workloads across multiple accelerators1
. DeepSeek released six software modules for Huawei's chips, mirroring open-source tools it had already published for Nvidia chips5
.Related Stories
Huawei Claims Market Share Victory Over Nvidia in China
Huawei's rotating chairman Eric Xu claimed that the company's Ascend line of neural processing units had exceeded Nvidia in Chinese market share
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. "It's pretty hard to collect data about the market share of Nvidia in China, but based on the data we have collected, Ascend has surpassed Nvidia," Xu said2
. During Nvidia's Q2 earnings call, executives revealed that while the company had begun shipments of a small volume of H200 accelerators to China, they amounted to less than 1 percent of its datacenter revenues2
. Huawei is currently deploying a 256,000-card Atlas 950 SuperCluster, while its newer architecture is designed to support training and inference for multi-trillion-parameter models and scale to as many as one million NPUs2
.US Export Controls Drive China's Push for Technological Self-Sufficiency in AI
US export controls have limited Chinese companies' access to Nvidia's most advanced chips as well as sophisticated equipment needed to manufacture cutting-edge semiconductors
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. After the Trump administration imposed new licensing requirements on Nvidia's and AMD's China-spec accelerators in April 2025, government officials in Beijing began pressuring data center operators to transition away from foreign accelerators in favor of homegrown alternatives2
. "We cannot accept a destiny where we cannot control our fate," Eric Xu said at a recent conference, "or have that fate being determined by others in terms of willingness to sell chips to China or not"4
. Huawei executives said the company could not meet China's demand for AI chips and related equipment and planned to restrict overseas sales as it prioritized its domestic market4
. The announcement came two weeks after Huawei unveiled its next generation of AI processors and supernode systems, with the company expecting its AI systems to be widely used for model training in 20271
.References
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