According to a report by STAR Market Daily citing multiple industry sources, DeepSeek plans to use Huawei’s Ascend AI chips to pre-train its next-generation model, DeepSeek V5, a shift since Ascend chips have previously been used primarily for inference rather than pre-training DeepSeek’s models. The collaboration dates back to early 2025, when around the Chinese New Year Huawei reportedly deployed more than 3,000 Ascend chips to support DeepSeek V3 and R1 on Huawei Cloud. Following the release of DeepSeek V4 in April 2026, Huawei announced that its Ascend SuperPoD systems could fully support the V4 model family through joint hardware-software optimisation. On September 30, DeepSeek open-sourced infrastructure components adapted for Huawei’s Ascend platform, including compiler tools, high-performance computing libraries and distributed communication software. On the training side, a research consortium in Shenzhen recently completed full-parameter post-training of DeepSeek V4-Pro, a 1.6-trillion-parameter model, using a cluster of Huawei Ascend 910C chips, though this was post-training rather than pre-training from scratch. If confirmed, pre-training V5 on Ascend chips would represent a major milestone for China’s domestic AI ecosystem and test whether Chinese AI accelerators can support full pre-training of a frontier large language model. The reported plan has not yet been independently confirmed.