DeepSeek's Own AI Chip Is China's Big Independence Bet
DeepSeek is designing its own AI inference chip to cut its reliance on Nvidia and Huawei, Reuters reported on July 7. The effort is early and faces steep manufacturing hurdles under U.S. export controls, but the intent is unmistakable. It signals that China's top AI lab now treats owning its compute as a strategic necessity, mirroring recent custom-silicon moves by OpenAI and Anthropic. For PMs, it is an early warning that the AI supply chain may split into two stacks, and your vendor choices will increasingly carry geopolitical weight.