China's DeepSeek Developing Its Own AI Chip (yahoo.com)
- Reference: 0184345772
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/07/07/1740259/chinas-deepseek-developing-its-own-ai-chip
- Source link: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/exclusive-chinas-deepseek-developing-own-103437335.html
> Chinese startup DeepSeek is [1]developing its own AI chip , according to three people familiar with the matter, a push that could reduce its reliance on Nvidia and Huawei chips, which it has depended on to train and run its globally popular models. The chip is designed for inference -- the stage of AI computing in which a trained model generates responses for users -- rather than for training new models, the sources said. If successful, DeepSeek's expansion into semiconductor development would mark a major strategic shift for a company widely hailed in China as the country's AI champion, potentially adding to challenges faced by Chinese tech giant Huawei.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/exclusive-chinas-deepseek-developing-own-103437335.html
Lithography (Score:5, Interesting)
Buried at the end of the article hints at the real story:
> Designing a competitive AI chip typically takes years and significant capital. Manufacturing poses another hurdle as the U.S. bans Chinese designers from accessing the most advanced overseas foundries, while separate U.S. curbs have cut China's access to high-bandwidth memory, a component critical to AI inference chips.
Not having access to [1]ASML's lithography [wikipedia.org] puts any of these efforts at a pretty serious disadvantage. So companies making designs isn't really the story to watch but the outcome of [2]Chinese lithography experiments [reuters.com].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML#2020s
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/how-china-built-its-manhattan-project-rival-west-ai-chips-2025-12-17/
Re:Lithography (Score:4, Informative)
For sure, Chinese chip making success or failure will be the real story.
A bunch of people are going to jump in now and say "derp see sanctions and tariffs ... have driven them toward domestic development"
No, this is not the case. The CCP wants a mono-polar world where they enjoy total hegemony. They have had their eye on the prize for two decades at least now. If you look at PRC history as far as 'friend factories' and collaborative efforts with soviet-bloc nations, and other technology transfer partnerships they have set the their sights on manufacturing industries ag, machine tools, aircraft, etc they see as critical and found someone willing to sell them some kind of on-the-job training that then enables them to develop independent domestic capabilities. They dump a ton of second-rate but useful product into the market place until they can grow enough domestic capacity and then they expand into the higher end of the market for their own domestic consumption.
Its like DRAM, China has been building out the capability to manufacture top-draw memory products for more than just the last two years, but they are getting their now, and its going to pay off big if we are dumb enough to let it.
China is going to develop a leading edge process chips industry period. Short of bombing them nothing will stop that..
Which of course brings us to the legitimate capitol of China (Taiwan) and our own dangerous dependence on them for those very same products. Either we need to be making damn sure we have domestic replacement or we need to be making a lot more aggressive/realistic plans for not just preventing an invasion but keeping the trade routes open.
Re: (Score:2)
I’m halfway through reading the book Killing Hope, the whole raison d'etre of US foreign policy was (and still is) to stamp out communism, socialism and even left leaning governments worldwide to help funnel resources to US corporations.
> The boys of Capital, they also chortle in their martinis about the death of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they hope no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century — without exce
Re:Lithography (Score:4, Insightful)
> Not having access to ASML's lithography puts any of these efforts at a pretty serious disadvantage. So companies making designs isn't really the story to watch but the outcome of Chinese lithography experiments
Or industrial espionage.
Or offering joint ventures to get the tech into the country and the workforce trained up.
Re: (Score:3)
Industrial espionage may help you with EUV lithography, but it sure isn't the main part of the problem.
(Actually, from what I've read recently, Chinese companies are going 3D before they get to EUV levels. That's another way around the problem. But you need to deal with a worse heat problem.)
Don't be too excited (Score:2)
Don't be too excited. It will only work in a limited set of servers and not with the standard AI frameworks. So even if you get the card, you probably can't run it. If you get the full server, you still need to rewrite your code. Unfortunately this isn't just a Nvidia clone you plug in and have fun with.
Not surprised (Score:3)
Given that they have optimized the crap out of the software they probably feel like they have done everything short of going assembly. But if you're going assembly you might as well just full send and make the hardware itself then you own the assembly.
It will be interesting to see where they go with this.
Re: (Score:3)
Compared to designing an instruction set architecture, going from a high level language to assembly language is simple.
But you are correct that a new instruction set architecture is likely beneficial. It has nothing to do with programming languages though, it really has to do with the nature of the actions to be taken to solve a problem.
This is a gross oversimplification but I think it demonstrates the issue. Common CPUs are sort of designed to do what spreadsheets and word processors need. We designe