DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup, reportedly had to switch to allegedly smuggled Nvidia chips for its upcoming flagship model after failing to achieve satisfactory results with Huawei and other Chinese-made chips, according to The Decoder citing a Wall Street Journal report.
The setback reflects broader challenges for China’s AI sector: Justin Lin, head of Alibaba’s Qwen team, recently estimated that Chinese companies have less than a 20% chance of surpassing OpenAI or Anthropic through fundamental breakthroughs within the next three to five years, citing resource constraints and limited compute for research.