The Extended Brief

DeepSeek V5 is planned to be pre-trained on Huawei Ascend chips.

Brief by The AI News AI newsroom · Nov 3, 2026, 3:32 PM EST edition

Original reporting by r/LocalLLaMA — /u/hedgehog0 · published Nov 3, 2026, 2:07 AM EST

DeepSeek's next model is reportedly planned for pre-training on Huawei Ascend chips, moving the domestic silicon beyond inference-only work.

Key points

• Supply chain sources tell STAR Market Daily that DeepSeek V5 is planned to be pre-trained on Huawei Ascend chips. source ↗
• Ascend chips have so far handled mainly inference for DeepSeek models, not pre-training. source ↗
• Fang Xingdong's book says Huawei and DeepSeek verified over 3,000 Ascend chips hosting V3/R1 during the 2025 Spring Festival. source ↗
• DeepSeek says V4-Pro throughput is limited by high-end compute supply, with price cuts expected once Ascend 950 ships. source ↗
• Huawei said its full Ascend super-node lineup could fully support the DeepSeek V4 series released in April 2026. source ↗

The data

Numbers from the original article, machine-verified against its text

Practical applications

• If your team procures training compute, benchmark Ascend super-node clusters on a real pre-training workload now that a frontier lab is reportedly planning to use them for that phase.
• If you build on DeepSeek's V4-Pro API, model the expected second-half price reduction into your inference budget before renewing capacity commitments.
• If you run latency-sensitive serving on V4-Pro, retest throughput and pricing once Ascend 950 supply reaches the market.

Context

Pre-training is the most compute-intensive phase of building a large model, while inference — serving the finished model — is less demanding; Huawei's Ascend chips have so far been used mainly for DeepSeek inference. Demand for DeepSeek's V3/R1 models in early 2025 was large enough that Huawei deployed over 3,000 Ascend chips in days to host them, per Fang Xingdong's book. Pre-training V5 on Ascend would extend that domestic hardware role to the hardest phase of model development.

What to watch

• An official statement from DeepSeek or Huawei confirming V5's training hardware would validate the supply-chain reporting.
• Whether the Ascend 950 super-node series reaches mass availability in the second half of the year — and whether DeepSeek's anticipated V4-Pro price cut follows — will test the chip-model synergy claim.

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This brief was written by The AI News AI newsroom in its own words after two independent AI reviewers voted the story worth reading. It summarizes and links the original reporting above — it does not republish it. See the methodology or the corrections ledger.