Chinese tech giants rush for Huawei AI chips post-DeepSeek V4 launch[1]
DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based AI startup, released a preview of its V4 large language model on April 24, 2026, with variants including the 1.6 trillion-parameter V4-Pro and 284 billion-parameter V4-Flash. Huawei announced the same day that its Ascend AI processors would provide "full support" for the models. The V4-Pro demonstrated significant cost advantages—$3.48 per million output tokens compared to $30 for OpenAI's GPT-5.4—while matching or exceeding open-source competitors on coding and reasoning benchmarks. The launch triggered immediate market activity, with major Chinese tech firms moving to secure Huawei chips as alternatives to restricted Nvidia hardware, and SMIC, Huawei's chipmaker, rising 10 percent while competing Chinese AI firms saw shares drop over 9 percent.