Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek has partnered with Huawei Technologies to develop programming tools for Huawei’s Ascend chips, in a move that highlights the growing cooperation between Chinese technology companies as they look for alternatives to Nvidia’s ecosystem.
DeepSeek said on Wednesday, September 30, 2026, that it was working with Huawei on programming tools for the company’s Ascend chip platform. The announcement comes as Chinese AI and technology companies continue to develop domestic alternatives for AI computing hardware and software.
As part of the collaboration, DeepSeek said it is open-sourcing infrastructure for Huawei’s Ascend platform. This includes a high-level programming language called TileLang, along with related compute and communication libraries.
TileLang is intended to provide developers with a programming layer for working with Huawei’s Ascend hardware. DeepSeek said the development is aimed at supporting a new GPU software ecosystem that is independent and self-controlled.
“To build a new generation of independent, self-controlled GPU software ecosystem, the first priority is establishing a high-level language that is universal, easy to program, and still capable of reaching the hardware’s full performance potential,” DeepSeek said.
The company added that TileLang was developed to address this requirement. “TileLang was created precisely to meet this need,” DeepSeek said, describing the language as offering “a simpler programming model” than Nvidia’s CUDA. According to the company, this can improve development efficiency and simplify code logic.
The partnership is focused on the software layer needed to make AI models and applications work efficiently on different computing hardware. Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem has become widely used by AI developers, and moving software from Nvidia hardware to other chip platforms can require changes to underlying code and optimisation work.
DeepSeek has previously worked with Huawei on adapting its AI models to the company’s Ascend hardware. In April 2026, Huawei said its Ascend chips had been used for part of the training of DeepSeek’s V4-Flash model, while the two companies had worked closely to adapt the DeepSeek-V4 model family to Huawei’s Ascend computing systems.
DeepSeek’s V4 model was released as a preview in April 2026 with versions designed to work with Huawei’s latest Ascend AI chips. Huawei said at the time that the entire Ascend supernode product line supported the DeepSeek-V4 series models.
The latest partnership goes beyond adapting individual models and focuses on programming infrastructure. By open-sourcing TileLang and related compute and communication libraries for the Ascend platform, DeepSeek is making software tools available for developers working with Huawei’s chips.
The development also comes amid restrictions on the export of advanced AI chips and semiconductor technologies to China. DeepSeek has previously used Nvidia chips for its AI models, while the company has also explored Chinese alternatives as access to advanced computing resources becomes an important consideration for AI development.
In February 2026, Reuters reported that DeepSeek had provided early access to its forthcoming V4 model to Chinese suppliers including Huawei, while Nvidia and AMD had not received access for performance optimisation. DeepSeek had previously worked closely with Nvidia’s technical staff.
The collaboration with Huawei therefore represents a further development in DeepSeek’s efforts to support AI models on domestic Chinese hardware. It also gives Huawei’s Ascend platform access to programming infrastructure designed around AI workloads.
For DeepSeek, the focus is on creating software tools that can make development and optimisation on Huawei hardware more accessible. For Huawei, the availability of programming tools and libraries around Ascend can support developers building and deploying AI workloads on its chips.
The latest move adds another layer to the broader development of China’s domestic AI computing ecosystem, with hardware and software companies working together to build alternatives to established platforms. DeepSeek’s partnership with Huawei places programming infrastructure alongside chip development and AI model optimisation as part of that effort.
