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DeepSeek SUPPLY CHAIN TRACE

AI CONSUMERS🇨🇳 China

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI lab spun out of High-Flyer quantitative hedge fund that shocked the industry in January 2025 when its DeepSeek-V3 and R1 models matched frontier US lab performance at a fraction of the reported training cost. Operating under US export controls that restrict NVIDIA H100/H200 access, DeepSeek pioneered efficiency techniques — including multi-head latent attention and FP8 training — and pivoted toward Huawei Ascend chips as its primary domestic alternative.

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Huawei Cloud

China's third-largest cloud provider; runs Huawei Ascend 910 AI clusters; closed-loop with HiSilicon — only Chinese cloud with end-to-end domestic chip+cloud stack

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CLOUD PROVIDERSprovides Ascend 910 AI compute to

Alibaba Cloud

China's #1 cloud provider; deploys Alibaba Hanguang 800 AI chip (TSMC-fabbed) and Huawei Ascend; operates Qwen LLM

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CLOUD PROVIDERSprovides AI cloud compute and hosting to

Tencent Cloud

China's #2 cloud provider; major AI GPU buyer pivoting to H20/Huawei Ascend after BIS export controls; operates Hunyuan LLM

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CLOUD PROVIDERSprovides AI cloud compute and hosting to

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DeepSeek

Chinese AI lab backed by High-Flyer quant fund; developed DeepSeek-V3/R1 frontier models using restricted NVIDIA H800 + Huawei Ascend; disrupted global AI pricing in Jan 2025

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About this company

QWhat is DeepSeek's role in the AI chip supply chain?

Chinese AI lab backed by High-Flyer quant fund; developed DeepSeek-V3/R1 frontier models using restricted NVIDIA H800 + Huawei Ascend; disrupted global AI pricing in Jan 2025

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