DeepSeek and Huawei take aim at Nvidia’s formidable moat

DEEPSEEK and Huawei are chipping away at one of Nvidia’s most important advantages in China. In the process, they are building a bridge that could make it far easier for Chinese artificial intelligence firms still reliant on American hardware to switch to home-grown alternatives.

The Hangzhou-based AI model maker and the Shenzhen telecommunications giant are teaming up on software, an underappreciated source of Nvidia’s continued global dominance.

While the Santa Clara-based chipmaker’s hardware gets most of the attention, its superior software ecosystem has long given developers another powerful reason to stick with its chips even as Huawei has aggressively tried to ramp up domestic shipments of alternatives.

DeepSeek has redeveloped its TileLang tools, which help developers optimise performance of AI chips, for Huawei’s Ascend platform – and is making them open-source, or freely available for others to use, the company said in a WeChat post lauding the collaboration.

It is a significant development because one of the biggest obstacles in trying to move away from Nvidia is not just acquiring the chips; it is also adapting and improving the software for a totally different computing stack.

DeepSeek and Huawei are trying to lower the cost of switching for China’s entire AI ecosystem.

Washington’s porous export-control policy may be helping the transition that Beijing so desperately wants. An airtight cut-off would have inflicted immediate pain in China.

Instead, imperfect enforcement of US restrictions has constrained access to Nvidia’s chips while leaving Chinese companies with enough of a lifeline to keep advancing, and buying Huawei precious time to improve its own products.

To be clear, demand for Nvidia’s products remains strong on the mainland as the vast grey markets and smuggling networks that have emerged make apparent.

Tech giants from Alibaba Group to ByteDance are reportedly queuing up to buy them, even while navigating headaches imposed by both Washington and Beijing.

Huawei, meanwhile, has acknowledged that it is struggling to meet the demand of the frenetic AI sector at home.

As China tech analyst Poe Zhao puts it, while the software gap is closing in public, “the supply gap is not”. The next major bottleneck, he added, is how many chips Huawei can actually produce.

That is a reality check for China, which loudly touts progress towards self-sufficiency – claims that Nvidia lobbyists have seized on to argue against tighter export controls.

Bargaining chips

Nvidia’s incentive to regain access to the lucrative market, and the billions of dollars in sales at stake, is clear enough. What makes the picture harder to read is that semiconductor restrictions have increasingly become bargaining chips in broader trade negotiations.

Blurring the distinction between a strategic contest over advanced technology and a trade dispute risks undermining Washington’s objectives in both.

Whether China would have pursued making home-grown chips so aggressively without export controls is hotly debated.

But the deepening partnership between two of the country’s most prominent tech champions indicates that the restrictions have only intensified the urgency. Executives at both firms have made that priority explicit.

DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng told investors that using more domestic chips to train its models is a major goal and expects Huawei to begin supplying training chips as early as the fourth quarter of this year, The Information reported last month, citing people familiar with the matter.

That timeline may prove optimistic, but the direction of travel is hard to dismiss.

Huawei’s rotating chairman Eric Xu also made the ambition overtly clear in a keynote in September. Based on the data it collected, he said that the company has surpassed Nvidia in terms of domestic market share (though official tallies may understate Nvidia’s sales because of the grey market for the chips).

More revealing than the numbers, however, was Xu’s determination. The Chinese people “will not accept a future in which others decide whether or not we can have access to certain products”. For the government, domestic industry and Huawei, he added, “the path is undoubtedly to push for full self-sufficiency”.

This transition is likely to happen slowly, then all at once, helped along by seemingly incremental software advances that make it easier to switch to domestic alternatives as they become available.

China has not breached Nvidia’s moat yet. But its tech industry is collectively figuring out where the weak points are, and how to punch through them.

Washington can’t say it wasn’t warned when the breach becomes obvious, and there is little left for its restrictions to protect. BLOOMBERG