On February 26, 2026, reports emerged indicating that DeepSeek had entrusted its newest large-scale model, the V4, to select domestic software and hardware providers for priority testing, with Huawei among the recipients. Notably, NVIDIA and AMD were not included in this round of testing. This strategic move deviates from the norm in the industry, where AI developers generally provide pre-release versions to major chip manufacturers concurrently to facilitate collaborative optimization. DeepSeek's approach might be designed to allocate dedicated optimization time for domestic chips, thereby fostering a closer technological integration between large-scale models and China's AI chip ecosystem.
