For weeks now, the global tech industry has been waiting for a major artificial intelligence (AI) launch from DeepSeek (深度求索), seen as a benchmark for China’s progress in the fast-moving field.
More than a year has passed since the start-up put Chinese AI on the map in early last year with a low-cost chatbot that performed at a similar level to US rivals.
However, despite reports and rumors about its imminent release, DeepSeek’s next-generation “V4” model is nowhere in sight.
Photo: AFP
Speculation is also swirling over the geopolitical implications of which computer chips were chosen to train and power the new system: world-leading US designs or made-in-China alternatives that the country is racing to develop.
“It’s important to know, because at one level, it is a signal of China’s AI self-sufficiency trajectory,” Counterpoint Research principal AI analyst Wei Sun said.
Tech news outlet The Information reported last week that V4 might be run on the latest chips made by China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為).
Such a shift would mark a milestone for China in its bid to beat US restrictions on the export of top-of-the-range AI chips from Californian titan Nvidia Corp to the country.
The report cited five people with direct knowledge of large orders for Huawei chips, made in preparation for the DeepSeek launch by tech giants including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴), ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動) and Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊).
DeepSeek, Huawei, Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent were contacted, but none were able to comment.
DeepSeek started life in 2023 as a side project of a hedge fund that had access to a cache of powerful Nvidia processors.
It shot to attention in January last year with its R1 deep-reasoning chatbot, which sent US tech shares tumbling with US President Donald Trump calling it a “wake-up call” for US firms.
R1 was based on DeepSeek’s last major AI model, V3, which was released in December 2024.
The company’s affordable, customizable AI tools have been widely adopted in China, and are also popular in emerging markets such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
V4 — said to be multimodal, meaning it can generate text, pictures and video — could again shock US tech valuations, Carthage Capital founder Stephen Wu said.
“I expect the upcoming DeepSeek V4 release will not just be a software update; it will be a highly capable, open-source model that handles massive context windows at a fraction of the cost,” he said.
However, DeepSeek’s reputation as a company at the frontier of AI technology is also at stake.
Its models previously relied on Nvidia chips, so a move to collaborate with domestic chipmakers would require “substantial re-engineering,” Wei said. “That transition can slow development cycles and introduce performance trade-offs, especially for V4, a model expected to be state-of-the-art.”
The US cites national security concerns as the reason for its export ban on Nvidia’s most powerful AI processors to China.
“The ongoing wait for DeepSeek V4 points to friction in scaling advanced models without unrestricted access to top-tier Nvidia hardware,” Wu said.
However, some reports allege that DeepSeek skirted the ban to train V4 using thousands of Nvidia’s top-end Blackwell chips, dismantled in third countries and smuggled to China.
Training AI models requires huge amounts of computing power — much more than for processing generative AI queries, which is known as inference.
Nvidia did not respond to a comment request, but told The Information it had not seen evidence of this and “such smuggling seems farfetched.”
Another Chinese AI start-up, Zhipu (智譜), in January unveiled an image generator that it said had been entirely trained on Huawei chips.
Alibaba this week said it would open a new data center for AI training and inference in southern China, powered by 10,000 of its own chips and operated by China Telecom Corp (中國電信).
As for DeepSeek, “if they have successfully trained V4 entirely on Huawei silicon, it signals a material shift in the geopolitical tech landscape,” Wu said.
Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves fell below the US$600 billion mark at the end of last month, with the central bank reporting a total of US$596.89 billion — a decline of US$8.6 billion from February — ending a three-month streak of increases. The central bank attributed the drop to a combination of factors such as outflows by foreign institutional investors, currency fluctuations and its own market interventions. “The large-scale outflows disrupted the balance of supply and demand in the foreign exchange market, prompting the central bank to intervene repeatedly by selling US dollars to stabilize the local currency,” Department of Foreign
Intel Corp is joining Elon Musk’s long-shot effort to develop semiconductors for Tesla Inc, Space Exploration Technologies Corp and xAI, marking a surprising twist in the chipmaker’s comeback bid. Intel would help the Terafab project “refactor” the technology in a chip factory, the company said on Tuesday in a post on X, Musk’s social media platform. That is a stage in the development process that typically helps make chips more powerful or reliable. The chipmaker’s shares jumped 4.2 percent to US$52.91 in New York trading on Tuesday. The Terafab project is a grand plan by Musk to eventually manufacture his own chips for
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) yesterday said it plans to resume operations at two coal-fired power generators for three months to boost security of electricity supply as liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply risks are running high due to the Middle East conflict. The two coal-fired power generators are at Mailiao Power Plant in Yunlin County’s Mailiao Township (麥寮). The plant, operated by Formosa Plastics Group (台塑集團), supplied electricity to Taipower’s power grid until the end of last year. Taipower’s decision came about one month after Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin (龔明鑫) on March 10 said that the nation had no imminent
ENERGY ISSUES: The TSIA urged the government to increase natural gas and helium reserves to reduce the impact of the Middle East war on semiconductor supply stability Chip testing and packaging service provider ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控) yesterday said it planned to invest more than NT$100 billion (US$3.15 billion) in building a new advanced chip testing facility in Kaohsiung to keep up with customer demand driven by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. That would be included in the company’s capital expenditure budget next year, ASE said. There is also room to raise this year’s capital spending budget from a record-high US$7 billion estimated three months ago, it added. ASE would have six factories under construction this year, another record-breaking number, ASE chief operating officer Tien Wu
RSS