China's AI industry closes ranks as Deepseek ships open-source software for Huawei's Ascend chips
DeepSeek open-sourced TileLang and chip libraries for Huawei's Ascend AI processors.
DeepSeek and Huawei released open-source programming tools for Huawei Ascend chips, including computation and inter-chip data-movement libraries built around TileLang, which DeepSeek says is easier to program than Nvidia CUDA while still using the hardware fully. The companies optimized a supernode of 128 Ascend 950 chips. TileLang began at Peking University, DeepSeek has used it for about a year, and it is now the company's main tool for AGI work. The partnership targets China's software gap with CUDA as Huawei says new processors will be widely used for training next year and plans fewer overseas chip sales because domestic demand exceeds supply.