DeepSeek gives China’s chipmakers leg up in race for cheaper AI

The rise of DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence (AI) models is seen providing some Chinese chipmakers such as Huawei a better chance to compete in the domestic market against more powerful U.S. processors.

Huawei and its Chinese peers have for years struggled to match Nvidia in building top-end chips that could compete with the U.S. firm’s products for training models, a process where data is fed to algorithms to help them learn to make accurate decisions.

However, DeepSeek’s models, which focus on “inference,” or when an AI model produces…