China's DeepSeek developing its own AI chip

Chinese startup DeepSeek is developing its own AI chip, according to three people familiar with the matter, Reuters reported on July 7. The effort could reduce the company's reliance on Nvidia and Huawei chips that it has depended on to train and run its models. The chip is designed for inference, the stage in which a trained model generates responses for users, rather than for training new models, the sources said. DeepSeek's effort remains at an early stage. The company has reached out to external partners and held discussions with chip-design, foundry and memory companies, the three sources said. The effort began about a year ago, one of the people said. The Hangzhou-based company has also increased hiring of chip-design engineers in recent months, but recruitment has been done privately without job postings on public hiring platforms, two of the sources said. If successful, the expansion into semiconductor development would mark a major strategic shift for the company, Reuters reported.