China’s DeepSeek is taking a page out of OpenAI’s playbook by developing its own AI chip for inference. The move would reduce the country’s reliance on semiconductors made by American Nvidia, which has struggled to reestablish a sales pipeline in China after US President Donald Trump began allowing chip exports last year. Like with OpenAI, bringing chip design in-house would also give DeepSeek more control over its technology stack. The Chinese government has been pushing domestic companies to address a shortage of access to powerful chips, which has been a barrier to the country’s development of advanced models.
The news, reported by Reuters, comes as DeepSeek’s pricing is making it more attractive to consumers and businesses. The share of tokens used by DeepSeek models on OpenRouter, which provides access to a series of AI models through one platform, has doubled in the last six months, according to its data — a surge that followed DeepSeek’s release of its newest V4 model in April. Nearly all Chinese model providers gained market share on the platform since January, while all US companies lost it.