China's AI industry closes ranks as Deepseek ships open-source software for Huawei's Ascend chips
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Chinese AI developer Deepseek has partnered with Huawei to release open-source programming tools for Huawei's Ascend chips, aiming to reduce reliance on Nvidia's dominant CUDA ecosystem. The core of this initiative is TileLang, a programming language originally developed by Peking University researchers that offers a simpler model than CUDA while maintaining high hardware performance. This collaboration addresses a critical bottleneck in China's AI industry, where domestic chipmakers have struggled to match the rapid software advancements made by local model developers like Z.ai and Moonshot AI. By optimizing supernodes consisting of 128 Ascend 950 chips, Huawei seeks to close the gap between hardware capabilities and software usability. Meanwhile, global analysis suggests Nvidia's software moat may be weakening, as seen with OpenAI's new Jalapeño chip outperforming Nvidia in specific efficiency metrics. However, Nvidia still maintains a significant lead in complex agent workloads, where its established software stack remains superior to competitors like AMD. Huawei's CANN software stack has previously demonstrated strong compatibility, being one of the few besides CUDA to support major models like DeepSeek V4 from day one.
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