Unhelpful Huawei AI chips are reportedly why Chinese model dev DeepSeek's next-gen LLMs are taking so long.

Following the industry rattling launch of DeepSeek R1 earlier this year, the Chinese AI darling faced pressure from government authorities to train the model's successor on Huawei's homegrown silicon, three unnamed sources have told the Financial Times.

But after months of work and the help of an entire team of Huawei engineers, unstable chips, glacial interconnects, and immature software proved insurmountable for DeepSeek, which was apparently unable to complete a single successful training run.

The failure, along with challenges with data labeling, ultimately delayed the release of DeepSeek R2 as the company started anew, using Nvidia's H20 GPUs instead. The company has reported

See Full Page