China’s AI industry closes ranks as Deepseek ships open-source software for Huawei’s Ascend chips

Deepseek is releasing open-source programming tools for Huawei’s AI chips. The centerpiece is TileLang, a language meant to be easier to work with than Nvidia’s CUDA software platform.

Chinese AI developer Deepseek has teamed up with Huawei to build programming tools for Huawei’s Ascend chips, according to a post on Deepseek’s official WeChat channel. The software includes libraries for computation and for moving data between chips, and Deepseek is making all of it open source, Reuters reports. According to Deepseek, Huawei “fully supported” the work. The two companies also optimized a so-called supernode, a cluster of 128 Ascend 950 chips. TileLang is at the core of the release. The open-source programming language for AI chips was originally developed by researchers at Peking University, and Deepseek has been using it for about a year. Deepseek argues that anyone trying to build an independent software ecosystem for AI chips first needs a universal language that’s easy to program but still gets full performance out of the hardware. In the company’s view, TileLang offers a simpler programming model than CUDA. Deepseek first tested the language on older Nvidia chips. TileLang is now the company’s main tool for its work on artificial general intelligence (AGI), The New York Times reports. Software will decide how far China’s chip push goes The partnership goes after one of the biggest problems facing China’s AI industry. Domestic chips need software that can get the most out of them. Nvidia’s dominance doesn’t come from chip design alone. It also rests on an estimated four million developers worldwide who build with CUDA. That ecosystem is the moat rivals like AMD haven’t been able to cross, even when their hardware looked just as strong on paper.