DeepSeek has released a preview of its V4 AI model, designed to run on Huawei’s Ascend chips instead of Nvidia hardware. The model performs strongly in knowledge benchmarks, rivals leading systems in handling long text tasks, and highlights China’s push to build an independent AI ecosystem amid global tech restrictions.
The DeepSeek V4 AI model has been presented as a major advance in open models, but its strongest performance claims still require external verification.
DeepSeek said the Pro version outperforms other open-source models in world-knowledge benchmarks and trails only Google’s closed-source Gemini-Pro-3.1. That claim draws immediate attention, but developers’ benchmark results often require independent replication before they can be treated as settled performance rankings.
Lewis Tunstall, a machine learning engineer at Hugging Face, said V4 quickly became the top-trending model on the platform and performs well on long, complex text tasks. The model can process more than one million tokens, putting it in the same broad long-context category as leading closed systems.
Still, V4 has limits. It does not support multiple modalities such as images and video, which means it remains behind major closed models in broader assistant-style use cases. Its real test will come from developers using it in coding, AI agents, research workflows and enterprise deployments.
China’s AI Hardware Shift Raises Global Stakes
The broader significance of DeepSeek V4 extends beyond its benchmark performance. It is the model’s alignment with Huawei’s Ascend chips, which signals China’s push to reduce dependence on Nvidia hardware.
Huawei said its chips were used in part of V4’s training process. He Hui, director of semiconductor research at Omdia, called the collaboration important because it shows top Chinese AI models can increasingly run on domestic hardware.
Read: China Allows DeepSeek to Buy Nvidia H200 AI Chips
That shift matters because Nvidia remains the dominant supplier of AI chips globally. U.S. export controls have made access to advanced chips a strategic issue, while Beijing has pushed Chinese firms toward self-sufficiency. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has warned that losing China’s developer ecosystem would be a damaging outcome for the U.S. company.
Markets reacted quickly. Chinese chipmakers, including Huahong Semiconductor and SMIC, rose after the launch, while some domestic AI rivals fell amid investor sentiment toward DeepSeek’s renewed momentum. The reaction shows that investors see V4 as more than a software update; they see it as a test of whether China can build a stronger AI stack around its own chips.
