Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent compete to buy Huawei Ascend 950PR to prepare for DeepSeek V4, chip prices have increased nearly 20% in recent weeks.

According to monitoring by 1M AI News, Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent have placed bulk orders for Huawei’s Ascend 950PR, with total order volumes in the tens of thousands of units. The three companies plan to distribute the model through their cloud services and integrate it into AI applications after DeepSeek V4 is released. This wave of centralized procurement has driven the Ascend 950PR price up 20% over the past few weeks. The chip began mass production this month.

Meanwhile, before DeepSeek released V4, it only opened an early access window to Chinese chip companies such as Huawei, refusing to allow Nvidia to participate. Typically, chip companies receive pre-access rights before the release of major models so they can prepare compatible software. This means that domestic chips have a software adaptation advantage before V4 is publicly released. Reuters previously reported first that Nvidia was rejected. DeepSeek has been working with Huawei and chip design company Cambricon to advance the hardware adaptation work for V4.

V4 was originally planned for release in February this year. Migrating the model from Nvidia’s architecture to Huawei’s chips requires rewriting the underlying code and running repeated tests, which is one of the main reasons for the delay. Currently, DeepSeek is still developing two additional V4 variants, each optimized for different capability dimensions, both for Chinese chip design.

Nvidia’s H20 has previously been widely used by Chinese companies to run DeepSeek models, but the Chinese government has banned large tech firms from procuring that chip. Whether the more powerful H200 can enter the Chinese market remains unclear. With options extremely limited, Huawei is virtually the only outlet for domestic companies to stock up ahead of the V4 release.