New to this? Read it in simple words
- DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company that shares much of its work for free.
- It released free tools that help programs run on Huawei’s AI chips.
- Most AI programs today are written for Nvidia’s chips and software.
- The new tools could make switching easier, but nobody outside has tested them.
- Open source
- Software whose code anyone can read, use and change.
- Kernel
- A small program that does one heavy maths job on a chip.
- CUDA
- Nvidia’s software that most AI programs use to run on its chips.
DeepSeek, the Hangzhou-based AI developer, announced the release on its official WeChat account on September 30. It came two weeks after Huawei unveiled its next generation of AI chips and computing systems.
What DeepSeek released
DeepSeek released six software modules for Huawei’s Ascend platform, the South China Morning Post reports. They mirror tools DeepSeek had already open-sourced for Nvidia’s chips.
Among them are compute and communication libraries. DeepSeek said Huawei gave “full support”, and that the two companies jointly advanced a “supernode” design built on 128 Ascend 950 chips, Reuters reports.
From TileLang’s project pages and Reuters. Speed on Huawei’s chip is not yet independently tested.
The role of TileLang
TileLang is an open-source language for writing kernels, the small programs that do the heavy maths on AI chips. It was first released in January 2025 by developers supervised at Peking University, and Nvidia’s CUDA is its main target.
On September 30, the project added official support for Huawei’s Ascend 950. Its notes say engineers from DeepSeek mainly developed this part, and thank “the Huawei team for their close collaboration and valuable support”.
DeepSeek says TileLang offers “a simpler programming model” than CUDA, Nvidia’s software platform.
What is not known yet
The project publishes its own speed charts for the Ascend 950, compared with Huawei’s PyTorch tools. No outside group has tested them yet, and DeepSeek did not announce a new model tuned for Huawei’s chips.
DeepSeek said the first step towards an “independent, self-controlled” software ecosystem for AI chips is a language that is universal, easy to program and still reaches the hardware’s full performance.
Sources
Every fact in this story comes from the sources below. Open them to check our work.
- 1
- 2Research · September 30, 2026DeepSeek partners with Huawei to develop chip programming tools, reducing reliance on Nvidia Reuters
- 3Research · September 30, 2026China’s DeepSeek open-sources tools to help Huawei chips supplant Nvidia in AI South China Morning Post
DeepSeek’s post is known from Reuters’ and the South China Morning Post’s reports. The speed charts are the project’s own, so we make no claim about performance.
DeepSeek open-sources tools for Huawei’s AI chips. Silicon AI News, September 30, 2026. https://siliconainews.com/stories/deepseek-huawei-ascend-tools
DeepSeek open-sourced tools and added Huawei’s Ascend 950 to TileLang, but no outside group has tested the project’s speed charts. How we rate the mood
The mood shows how the news frames the event for the tech and AI world: as an opportunity (6 and above) or as a loss (below 5). It is not our verdict on who is right.