The chip DeepSeek ordered 160,000 of now costs up to half as much again
Six days after DeepSeek was reported ordering at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips, Huawei put the price up. The card is now indicated at above ¥250,000, as much as half again what customers were quoted in July.
Reuters reports the Ascend 950DT accelerator card's indicated price is now above ¥250,000, about $37,255, a rise of 20% to 50% in two months. Cambricon has repriced its next generation chip, tentatively the 690, at 20% to 30% above what it indicated earlier. The driver is high bandwidth memory. Since Washington tightened export controls on advanced HBM to China in December 2024, Chinese chipmakers have increasingly bought it on grey markets, where it typically costs several times what buyers elsewhere pay, and memory is a large share of what an accelerator costs to make.
Why this one is different
The argument about China's domestic AI stack has been about whether its chips are good enough. This is a different constraint: they are available, and they are getting expensive fast, because the part that sits next to the processor is the part export controls reached. When this site added the 950DT to its chip index on 6 September, its price was not published. Four days later there is one, and it is rising.
Not whether the chips are good enough. Whether the memory can be bought.
How we got here
- Dec 2024The US tightens export controls on advanced high bandwidth memory to China.
- 4 Sep 2026DeepSeek is reported ordering at least 160,000 Ascend 950DT chips, with Huawei's output capped by a memory shortage.
- 6 Sep 2026The Ascend 950DT enters this site's chip index. Price: not published.
- 8 Sep 2026Samsung, one of the three makers of HBM, leads a €3bn round into Mistral.
- 10 Sep 2026Reuters: the 950DT card is indicated above ¥250,000, up 20% to 50% in two months.
What it does and does not mean
These are indicated prices, not transaction prices, from a single Reuters report, and a buyer committing to 160,000 units is unlikely to pay list. It does not show that Huawei cannot supply the chip, or that the 950DT is uncompetitive at the new price. What it does show is where the binding constraint on China's AI hardware has moved. Export controls did not need to stop the processor to raise its cost; stopping the memory beside it was enough, and the bill for that is now arriving on the price list rather than in a policy paper.