Vivold Consulting

DeepSeek's R2 Model Launch Delayed Due to Hardware Issues

Chaos at DeepSeek as R2 launch crashes into hardware problems - rivals gain huge advantage

Key Insights

DeepSeek's R2 model launch faces significant delays due to hardware issues with Huawei’s Ascend chips, forcing a switch back to Nvidia hardware for training. Competitors like Alibaba’s Qwen3 are capitalizing on these setbacks.

Stay Updated

Get the latest insights delivered to your inbox

DeepSeek's R2 Model Hits a Snag: What Went Wrong?

- Hardware Hurdles: Persistent issues with Huawei’s Ascend chips have stalled the R2 model's launch, originally slated for May 2025.
- Plan B: DeepSeek is reverting to Nvidia hardware for training, though inference tasks still rely on Ascend.
- Competitor Advantage: Rivals like Alibaba’s Qwen3 are seizing the opportunity to advance their own AI models.

Implications: This situation highlights the challenges in China's push for AI self-sufficiency and the delicate balance between political goals and technological realities. Businesses should monitor how these developments might influence the AI landscape and their strategic decisions.

Related Articles

Google's chief scientist walks: Jeff Dean leaves after 27 years, taking three legends with him

Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist and 30th employee, is leaving after 27 years to found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation using AI to automate scientific research - taking co-founders Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le (Google Brain), and Oriol Vinyals (DeepMind) with him. Google is a founding investor and cloud partner, supplying compute for at least the first year, with Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures co-leading the seed. In the same announcement, Demis Hassabis steps down as DeepMind CEO to become chairman and Alphabet chief scientist, with Koray Kavukcuoglu taking over Gemini model development. Alphabet stock fell about 4%.

Texas slams the brakes on data centres - and the AI buildout's easiest frontier just closed

Governor Greg Abbott announced that all new Texas data-centre projects must be audited by the Public Utility Commission and grid operator ERCOT - a sharp turn for a state whose loose regulation and cheap power made it second only to Virginia for data centres. The trigger is a staggering queue: ERCOT's interconnection requests doubled from 233GW in January to 474GW, about 90% data centres, more than five times the grid's all-time peak demand. Audits will demand power and water use, noise mitigation, light controls, tax-incentive use, and ownership details - after a voluntary survey that most operators simply ignored.

Anthropic signs a $10B, six-year compute deal with a startup that didn't exist last year

Anthropic has reportedly signed a $10 billion, six-year compute deal with Volta, an AI cloud startup founded only earlier this year, per Bloomberg. Volta is partnering with crypto-mining firm Bitdeer to develop the data centre - located in Norway, delivering 133 megawatts, and running Nvidia's Vera Rubin architecture - and is a member of Nvidia's Cloud Partner programme. It caps an aggressive capacity spree that also includes recent compute deals with SpaceX and Amazon, as Anthropic races rivals for the scarcest input in the industry.