DeepSeek's New AI Model Reportedly Built for Upcoming Home-Grown Chips in China

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has revealed that China will soon have home-grown “next generation” chips for AI systems, which raises the question of whether the country has achieved a big breakthrough in building its own technology stack.  
The statement came in a short note on the company’s official WeChat account, where DeepSeek explained the “UE8M0 FP8 scale” used in its latest model V3.1. The company said the model was made “for the home-grown chips to be released soon,” but did not name the vendor or explain if the chips will be used for model training or inferencing, SCMP reports.  
DeepSeek described its V3.1 model as adding reasoning and non-reasoning modes under a single system. The company said it used the UE8M0 FP8 scale data format to ensure it works well with microscaling data formats. This format is meant to cut memory use by up to 75%, which could make training faster and reduce hardware demand. And if you already didn’t know, in an AI development and use lifecycle, most of the emissions and water consumption happen during model training.
DeepSeek’s earlier V3 model was trained on 2,048 Nvidia H800 chips, though the company has not disclosed the hardware used in building V3.1 or its R1 reasoning model.
Meanwhile, Chinese chipmakers, including Huawei Technologies and Moore Threads, have been working to adapt their processors for use with local AI models.
It’s safe to say that this marks one more step in China’s push to reduce reliance on US technology, especially as AI demand grows and chip controls remain tight. This is especially true when what the US is providing to China is of reduced performance.
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