DeepSeek plans to order at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend chips to power the Inner Mongolia campus this thread already tracks under construction

What happened

DeepSeek plans to deploy at least 160,000 of Huawei's next-generation Ascend 950DT accelerators at the gigawatt-scale Inner Mongolia data center this thread logged as under construction on 07-30, which would create one of the largest known clusters of Chinese AI chips and mark a real step in China's push to route around Nvidia. Bloomberg reports the deployment is for operating (serving) DeepSeek's models rather than training them — DeepSeek has previously tried and failed to train on Huawei silicon and continues to rely on Nvidia chips for that step, so this extends rather than closes the training/inference split this thread has tracked elsewhere (Z.ai's GLM-5.3-Flash serving-only Chinese-chip claim, 08-27). Huawei's own production capacity is the binding constraint — fulfilling the full order could take more than a year. (Bloomberg, Seeking Alpha)
The US and China are preparing for their first official bilateral talks devoted exclusively to AI safety since Trump's second term began, planned for mid-September (Reuters, exclusive, 2026-09-04). Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent would lead for the US side; on China's side, Vice Premier He Lifeng is the likely lead, with the No. 7-ranked official Ding Xuexiang floated as an alternative. Reported agenda: Washington's concern about a future Chinese Mythos-class model capable of cyberattacks, and US allegations that Chinese labs have distilled proprietary US models (the Amodei/Alibaba-Qwen distillation dispute). The talks would come ahead of an expected Trump-Xi summit. ⚠️ Contested: a US Treasury spokesperson told Reuters no meeting is currently scheduled and said the final agenda and participants remain unsettled — the first wire-sourced date attached to talks that had been reported since July only as "later this year." (Reuters via CNBC, Japan Times, Business Standard)

Sources 5

Bloomberg bloomberg.com high 0.84 disputed / split
Seeking Alpha seekingalpha.com solid 0.694
Reuters via CNBC cnbc.com high 0.85
Japan Times japantimes.co.jp high 0.871
Business Standard business-standard.com solid 0.621

Credibility ratings combine two public datasets: Lin et al. 2023, PNAS Nexus 2(9):pgad286 (CC BY 4.0) for the domain-quality score, and Wikipedia's perennial-sources list (CC BY-SA 4.0) for the reliability tier. A rating describes an outlet's general record, never this particular article. Unrated means absent from those datasets — not a judgement.

The Projection

DeepSeek plans to order at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend chips to power the Inner Mongolia campus this thread already tracks under construction

What happened

Sources 5

The wider story