China's AI industry closes ranks as Deepseek ships open-source software for Huawei's Ascend chips

DeepSeek and Huawei have collaborated on programming tools for Ascend chips and released them all as open source. At their core is TileLang, a language that is easier to learn than CUDA. It was originally developed by researchers at Peking University, and DeepSeek has used it for about a year. The companies have also optimised a supernode comprising 128 Ascend 950 chips, with Huawei saying it provided full support. DeepSeek argues that an independent AI chip software ecosystem first needs a general-purpose language that is easy to program and can fully exploit the hardware's performance.