DeepSeek previews AI model optimized for Huawei chips, advancing domestic AI supply chain
This marks a strategic shift towards reducing reliance on NVIDIA hardware, demonstrating progress in China's domestic AI ecosystem.
DeepSeek previewed an AI model optimized for Huawei's Ascend chips, marking the first confirmed instance of a top-tier Chinese foundation-model lab adapting its flagship architecture to domestic silicon, as reported by DD News. This ranks above this fortnight's other items because it is a first-of-kind artifact: it moves the US-China compute debate from theory to demonstrable engineering, showing that a frontier-class model can run on Huawei hardware without NVIDIA.
The preview directly addresses the export-control constraint that has shaped DeepSeek's compute strategy since its founding, per the DD News report.
DeepSeek reported a 75% price cut on its V4-Pro API in July 2026, a move that predates this Huawei optimization by roughly two weeks. The company also released V4-Flash-0731 on July 31 with new agent-task benchmarks, per prior coverage.
The adaptation signals that DeepSeek's upcoming V4-Pro release—widely expected after the V4-Flash API entered public beta—may include a Huawei-optimized inference path.
By contrast, no other Chinese foundation-model lab has publicly demonstrated a model optimized for Huawei's Ascend architecture in this window.
Notable Developments
- DeepSeek — reopened talks for a RMB50B funding round at a ~RMB500B valuation, signaling major capital escalation and solidifying its position as a top-tier Chinese AI lab.
- Moonshot AI — closed a $3.5B Series F at a $35B valuation, led by the National AI Industry Fund, and is now preparing a Pre-IPO round at a $50B target, marking a decisive capital escalation in China's foundation-model race.
- Moonshot AI — targets a $50B pre-IPO valuation ahead of a Hong Kong listing, following its $3.5B round and the launch of the open-source Kimi K3 model, positioning it as a leading sovereign-backed AI contender.
- LiblibAI — reached a $2B valuation with a ~$300M Series B+ round, leveraging a 'middleman' model that resells APIs from larger providers like ByteDance, highlighting the shift towards application-layer monetization.
- Alibaba — released Qwen3.8, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model ranking second only to Anthropic's Claude in Arena, and will open-source variants next week, intensifying the open-weight competition in foundation models.
- PokeBot — raised hundreds of millions of dollars in a Pre-A round led by Shunwei Capital and Matrix Partners, indicating top-tier Chinese VC confidence in the early promise of household embodied AI.
- 01.AI — pivoted away from foundation-model pretraining to enterprise solutions and filed for a Hong Kong IPO with ~$2.1B in contract orders, marking a strategic retreat from the base-model competition.
- PaXini — closed a RMB1B (~$140M) strategic round for tactile-sensing chips, having shipped nearly 1 million units in the past year, validating a key bottleneck in the robotics sensor stack.
- Ant International — raised a $1.2B Series A to build AI agents for autonomous cross-border payments, leveraging its 150M-merchant network to compete for the agentic commerce settlement layer.
- LG AI Research — released K-EXAONE 2.0, Korea's largest 750B-parameter open-weight model, on Hugging Face, signaling a major leap in the country's sovereign AI push.
By Country
🇰🇷 Korea
- Limpid — Limpid secured 1.5 billion won in Deep Tech TIPS R&D funding over 36 months for camera-based animal behavior AI and personalized nutrition tools.
- Addit & Ark — Addit & Ark received seed funding from Mashup Ventures, Kakao Ventures, and others to expand its AI-based Instagram organic-view advertising platform.
- Isabella — Isabella obtained seed funding from CNT Tech for Lunéo, its home-use women's health device combining low-temperature plasma, LED technology, and biometric-data analysis.
- Edit&Arch — Edit&Arch secured seed investment from Mashup Ventures, Kakao Ventures, Base Ventures, and BZCF for Adit, its AI-driven Instagram advertising service.
- DeepX — DeepX raised $30 million in the first close of its Series D to advance edge-computing AI semiconductor development.
- Omnius — Omnius raised ¥1 billion from Korea Investment Partners in 2017 for fashion-image recognition and tagging tools trained on more than 800,000 images.
- Xylo Labs — South Korean startup Xylo Labs raises $133K seed from MYSC for on-device AI predictive maintenance that fuses sound, vibration, and operational data to detect industrial equipment failures before they
- Snapscale — Snapscale, a Korean startup, raises seed funding for AutoFlow, an AI design automation tool that integrates with existing CAD software for EPC plant engineering.
🇨🇳 China
- DeepSeek — DeepSeek announced a significant API price increase amid global demand, following the release of its 284-billion-parameter DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 model.
- Kaiwang Data — Kaiwang Data completed a strategic round exceeding RMB100 million to expand multimodal embodied-AI data collection, trading-platform development, and world-model research.
- 奇点逃逸 — Singularity Escape raised approximately RMB10 million in a seed round to develop Nexus, an AI-native team operating system based on an organizational state graph.
- Thalamus Intelligence — Thalamus Intelligence raises seed funding for MemAura, a natively multimodal long-term memory base model targeting proactive, state-driven AI, and co-releases a multimodal memory benchmark with NVIDIA
- 月之暗面 (Moonshot AI) — Moonshot AI raises $483M at $35B valuation, seeks $50B pre-IPO, as Chinese AI labs face market pressure to justify high multiples beyond model capability.
- Kando AI — Kando AI raises seed funding to build a 'Cursor for decision-making'—an AI workbench that learns from real-world financial and research decisions by capturing user feedback and post-hoc outcomes.
- Delta Intelligence — Delta Intelligence, a UCLA PhD-founded humanoid robot foundation-model startup, raises ~$70M in Angel++ round from OEMs and VCs, targeting native 3D loco-manipulation for industrial and household use.
- 词元无限 — Chinese startup Token Infinite raises angel++ round totaling hundreds of millions of RMB for enterprise AI agent infrastructure, signaling VC conviction in the emerging agent middleware layer.
🇯🇵 Japan
- Knowledge Work — Knowledge Work announced a ¥3.5 billion first close for its Series C, backing development of its sales-specialized AI Agent OS.
- Morgenrot — Morgenrot closed a ¥100 million extension from Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, bringing its Series B total to ¥1.35 billion for GPU resource management software.
- DFree — DFree launched an equity crowdfunding round of up to ¥10.08 million on FUNDINNO for its ultrasonic AI device predicting urination and defecation timing.
- Iore — Iore launched an official website for its AI data center business, which offers GPU server sales, colocation deployment, and managed operations.
- NUJP — NUJP raises 100M yen (~$666K) from Incubate Fund and DRG FUND for platform combining brand investment, overseas expansion, and generative AI agent development.
- KAERU — KAERU, a Japanese welfare cashless payment startup, raised funding from Akigin NEXT Fund to expand regional bank partnerships and service deployment.
- bestat — Japanese startup bestat raises ¥310M Series A for 3D.Core, an industrial 3D data platform for digital twins and physical AI, backed by regional and corporate VCs.
- Google — Google added Gemini 3-powered GenTabs to its experimental Disco browser, enabling macOS waitlist users to generate task-specific web apps from browsing context.
🇮🇳 India
- Pinegap — Pinegap raised an $8 million Series A led by Stellaris Venture Partners to expand its agentic equity-research platform, sales operations, and engineering team.
- InRisk Labs — InRisk Labs secured a $27 million Series A co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Northpoint to scale its AI-driven insurance risk analytics platform.
- Superleap — Superleap raised $3.8 million in seed funding led by Peak XV's Surge to build an AI-native CRM platform for the Indian market.
- NYAI — NYAI raised a $1.5 million seed round for AI-powered legal document automation and compliance tools tailored to the Indian market.
- Revspot — AI startup Revspot raises $4.8M Series A to improve AI infrastructure and expand into B2C, a sub-scale round in the current capital environment.
- Flexprice — Flexprice raises $1.5M seed to build AI-native billing infrastructure supporting token, API, and GPU-based pricing for AI companies.
- Satark AI — Indian cybersecurity startup Satark AI raises pre-seed at $4M valuation cap, positioning its AI decision layer to reduce enterprise alert noise and simplify cyber risk decisions.
- Innefu Labs — India-based Innefu Labs raises $30M Series B led by Panthera Growth Partners to expand sovereign AI and national security technology globally.
Southeast Asia
- Ropedia (SG) — Singapore-based Ropedia raises $30M pre-Series A to scale its Homie wearable data pipeline and Xperience-10M dataset for training physical AI and robotics systems.
- Razer and NUS (SG) — Razer and the National University of Singapore opened a joint Singapore lab to research gaming-specific AI models, digital companions, and real-time systems.
- ADA (SG) — ADA acquired Algonomy, adding more than 400 global brand clients and retail AI capabilities to expand from customer data management into marketing execution.
Compiled from 34 linked sources across AI Market Watch's Asia news index. Fortnight covers 2026-07-24 – 2026-08-07.