Mackenzie Hawkins, Bloomberg — article, Sept 4, 2026

DeepSeek ordered at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips for a gigawatt-scale Inner Mongolia data center

The order and the constraint

DeepSeek is building a roughly one-gigawatt data center in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia — enough power draw for about 750,000 homes, sited partly for the region’s wind, solar, and naturally cool climate — and wants at least 160,000 of Huawei’s next-generation Ascend 950DT chips to run it. There’s a catch built into the order itself: Huawei’s 950DT, due to launch Q4 2026, is capacity-constrained to the low hundreds of thousands of units this year by shortages of high-bandwidth memory and other components, and Huawei is juggling other customers too. Bloomberg’s sourcing says DeepSeek has gone as far as asking Beijing to lean on Huawei to prioritize and speed the allocation. Delivery of the full order could stretch past a year.

What it’s for, and what it isn’t

Despite Huawei engineering the 950DT for both training and inference, DeepSeek plans to use it strictly for inference — running models, not building them. Training stays on Nvidia hardware, continuing a pattern: DeepSeek previously tried training on Huawei silicon and it didn’t work out, and there’s no indication that’s changing. At a street price near 111,000 yuan (~$16,000) per chip, the order could run north of $2.5 billion. It lands against a backdrop where Nvidia’s Chinese market share has reportedly cratered — from roughly 40% to something like 8% in forecasts cited elsewhere — and where Huawei’s rotating chair has argued that networking large numbers of individually weaker chips together can close the gap with Nvidia at the system level, even if no single 950DT competes with a single Blackwell.

edited and authored by Dave with close collaboration by Claude