DeepSeek plans large Huawei chip order for new Inner Mongolia data centre

DeepSeek plans to buy a large quantity of Huawei Ascend AI chips for a one-gigawatt data centre in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, targeting partial operation in late 2027 or early 2028. The purchase aligns with China’s “Eastern Data, Western Compute” policy to shift energy-intensive AI workloads to low-cost power regions and cut dependence on Nvidia hardware. Huawei is increasing Ascend production to satisfy the order, while DeepSeek continues developing its own SMIC-based inference chip as a longer-term solution.