Facing US export controls, China's DeepSeek plans to make its own chips

DeepSeek, the Chinese startup developing large language models that are competitive with those from US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, is planning to enter the silicon business, according to Reuters.

Citing three people familiar with the matter, Reuters writes that DeepSeek has been working on a move into silicon for about a year. It has been meeting with potential partners in the hardware and silicon space and has been hiring engineers for the project.

The focus is on data center chips for inference, not training, and the goal is likely to reduce reliance on both Huawei and Nvidia.

Nvidia is the chipmaker for most AI companies in North America and Europe, but a United States export ban has prevented the company from achieving a similar presence in China. Huawei controls about half of the data center chip market there, and DeepSeek isn’t the only one trying to enter; Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Baidu have been making moves, too.

While chip export controls in the US are a major reason this is an urgent concern for DeepSeek, US-based AI companies are making similar chip plans.

For example, OpenAI and Broadcom jointly announced Jalapeño, the former’s first chip designed for inference at scale, just a couple of weeks ago. Anthropic, too, has been exploring custom chip design, though there have not been any publicly visible milestones yet.

In OpenAI’s case, it’s partly a play to reduce its reliance on Nvidia, but it’s also a desire to have Apple-like control over the entire tech stack for its products. Further, getting in at the silicon and data center levels can be an advantage in a market where data center access is likely to remain constrained, with multiple companies competing for compute as they scale up their AI models and services.