Nvidia’s Huang Warns DeepSeek Running on Huawei Chips Would Be ‘Horrible’ for the US
April 18, 2026 - 11:14 am
In short: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warned on the Dwarkesh Podcast that DeepSeek optimising its AI models for Huawei’s Ascend chips instead of American hardware would be “a horrible outcome” for the United States, as the Chinese AI lab prepares to launch its V4 foundation model on Huawei’s Ascend 950PR processor. The migration from Nvidia’s CUDA to Huawei’s CANN framework threatens to break the software-hardware dependency underpinning American AI dominance, even as US lawmakers push to place DeepSeek on the entity list for export control.
"If future AI models are optimised in a very different way than the American tech stack," Huang said, *and as "AI diffuses out into the rest of the world" with Chinese standards and technology, China "will become superior to" the US.
The statement is notable because it comes from the CEO of the company that has benefited most from the current arrangement, in which virtually every frontier AI model in the world is trained on Nvidia GPUs using Nvidia’s CUDA software framework.
What DeepSeek is Building
DeepSeek is preparing to launch V4, a multimodal foundation model expected later this month. The Information reported earlier in April that V4 would run on Huawei’s latest Ascend 950PR processor, while a separate Reuters report suggested the model had been trained on Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, which would constitute a violation of US export controls.
What makes the Huawei integration significant is the software migration behind it. DeepSeek has spent months rewriting its core code to work with Huawei’s CANN framework, moving away from the CUDA ecosystem that Nvidia has spent two decades building into the foundation of AI development. CUDA’s dominance has functioned as a second layer of American control over AI, beyond the chips themselves. Export restrictions can limit which Nvidia hardware reaches China, but as long as Chinese labs wrote their software for CUDA, they remained dependent on the Nvidia ecosystem even when using alternative processors. DeepSeek’s move to CANN breaks that dependency.
DeepSeek’s V3 model, launched in late 2024, was trained on 2,048 Nvidia H800 GPUs, a chip tailor-made for the Chinese market that was itself banned from sale to China in 2023. The company has already demonstrated that it can produce frontier-competit