DeepSeek Releases AI Model V4 Adapted for Huawei Chips

Chinese startup DeepSeek has released a preview version of its new artificial intelligence model, V4, adapted to run on Huawei chips, according to multiple reports. This move marks another step in China's push to build a self-sufficient AI ecosystem amid U.S. export controls.

The model comes in two versions: the more powerful and expensive Pro, and the cheaper, lighter Flash. DeepSeek-V4-Pro is positioned as a higher-end model with performance comparable to leading closed-source systems, particularly in agentic coding, world knowledge, STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), and competitive programming. In maximum reasoning mode, Pro outperforms all open-source models but still trails frontier closed-source systems such as Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro and OpenAI's GPT-5.4 in some areas.

DeepSeek-V4-Flash delivers similar reasoning ability in some areas but runs faster and at a lower cost than Pro, with weaker world knowledge and lower performance on more demanding agent-based tasks. Both versions support a 1-million-token context window, matching the expansion DeepSeek introduced with V3 in February.

A key change from earlier DeepSeek releases is that V4 was adapted for Huawei's most advanced Ascend AI chips. According to Reuters, hours after the preview release, Huawei said V4 is fully supported on its Ascend 950-based supernode clusters, and that its chips were used for part of V4-Flash's training.

The partnership between DeepSeek and Huawei shows progress toward AI infrastructure self-sufficiency. However, DeepSeek faces compute constraints under U.S. export controls on Nvidia chips and chipmaking equipment. The company said Pro can cost up to 12 times more than Flash because of 'constraints in high-end compute capacity,' limiting current Pro service availability.

Market reaction to the release has been subdued compared with DeepSeek's breakthrough last year after the launch of its low-cost AI models, according to Reuters. The muted response highlights how quickly assumptions about cost, competition, and China's ability to innovate under U.S. chip restrictions have shifted.

'This announcement followed a rather predictable path,' said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia. Analysts note that advances in model architectures and efficiency have since been widely explored across industry and academia. Benchmark data support this view, with DeepSeek-V4 Pro showing significant improvement over previous versions but ranking among leading open-weight models rather than clearly surpassing rivals.

The significance of V4 lies less in market impact and more in the U.S.-China race for tech supremacy, according to Alfredo Montufar-Helu, managing director at Ankura China Advisors. He pointed to DeepSeek's adaptation of V4 to run best on Huawei chips as a response to tightening U.S. export controls designed to cut off access to cutting-edge U.S. chips that power AI model development.