Huawei Invests 290 Trillion Won Over 10 Years to Develop Chips Powering DeepSeek

Huawei has successfully powered 'DeepSeek' using its proprietary AI chips, investing 290 trillion won over the last decade. Leveraging the massive cash flow generated from its core businesses in telecommunications equipment and smartphones, the company has concentrated its investments on AI chip development. Of its 862.1 billion yuan in revenue in 2024, 179.7 billion yuan (20.8%) was allocated to R&D, with plans to increase this ratio to 21.8% in 2025.

In particular, Huawei achieved a milestone by deploying its self-developed 'Ascend 910C' chip for the post-training of the Chinese AI model 'DeepSeek V4.' This is evaluated as a case that proves the competitiveness of domestic AI chips amid U.S. government export controls on Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) to China.

Huawei has announced a roadmap to sequentially develop the 'Ascend 950,' '960,' and '970' series over the next three years, a move expected to contribute to China's semiconductor self-sufficiency.