By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-02-02 11:11:22 | Updated at 2025-02-02 13:58:38
2 hours ago
The cloud-computing unit of Huawei Technologies has worked overtime with a local company during the Lunar New Year holidays to make DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence (AI) models available to end users on its platform in an efficient and affordable way.
Huawei’s cloud unit teamed up with Beijing-based AI infrastructure start-up SiliconFlow to make DeepSeek’s large language model V3 and reasoning model R1 available to end users through the telecom giant’s Ascend cloud service, with performance matching “DeepSeek models run on global premium graphic processing units [GPUs]”, Huawei Cloud said in a statement on Saturday.
According to a separate statement from SiliconFlow, which hosts the DeepSeek models, the charge for access to V3 on its platform is discounted to 1 yuan (US$0.13) for 1 million input tokens and 2 yuan for 1 million output tokens, while the same charges for the R1 model are 4 yuan and 16 yuan.
The move by Huawei and SiliconFlow comes as the open-source DeepSeek models are gaining popularity in both China and the US. OpenAI investor Microsoft earlier this week launched support for R1 on its Azure cloud-computing platform and GitHub. This allows clients to build AI applications that run locally on Copilot+ personal computers. E-commerce giant Amazon.com has enabled developers to create applications with the “powerful, cost-efficient” R1 through Amazon Web Services.
Huawei’s Ascend cloud service used its home-grown Ascend solution for compute resources, which could involve various types of hardware including Huawei’s self-developed server clusters, AI modules and accelerator cards, a company website said.
Huawei and SiliconFlow did not specify the chips used in the Ascend cloud service.
