Reports revealed that Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has delayed the release of its R2 model, originally scheduled for May, due to persistent technical failures with Huawei’s Ascend chips.
Despite assistance from Huawei engineers, training could not be completed successfully, forcing a reversion to Nvidia hardware for training purposes while Ascend chips are now relegated to inference.
This setback has allowed competitors such as Alibaba’s Qwen3 to capitalize and advance. The delay underscores the broader challenge of China’s tech self-sufficiency goals, particularly as domestic chip performance and software maturity lag behind U.S. alternatives.
