Huawei's Ascend 950 chips sell out as ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba scramble for supply

ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba are negotiating additional orders of Huawei's Ascend 950PR AI chips following the DeepSeek V4 release. Huawei plans to produce roughly 750,000 Ascend 950PR chips in 2026, with mass production starting in April and full-scale shipments rolling out in the second half of the year.

The demand surge caught the industry off guard. When DeepSeek V4 launched, China's tech giants rushed to secure Ascend 950PR units. The chip outperforms NVIDIA's China-specific H20 variant and remains the only domestic chip supporting compressed numerical format AI computation.

Huawei distributed samples to these companies in January. Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud launched DeepSeek V4-related services the same day the model dropped. The Ascend supernode infrastructure now fully supports DeepSeek V4, indicating coordinated preparation.

Supply remains the bottleneck. U.S. export controls on advanced chipmaking equipment mean Huawei's 750,000-unit production target likely won't meet market demand. Even with cash in hand, securing units won't be guaranteed.

This buying frenzy marks a shift for domestic AI chips. The Ascend 950PR earned market acceptance through performance, not sentiment. When full shipments begin in the second half of 2026, China's AI compute landscape may see a significant reshuffle.