DeepSeek withholds AI model V4 access from Nvidia and AMD

DeepSeek withheld pre-release access to its flagship model V4 from US chipmakers Nvidia and AMD, instead granting early optimization access exclusively to domestic Chinese suppliers including Huawei. This breaks standard industry practice of sharing models with global hardware partners for performance tuning ahead of the expected Lunar New Year launch. The event matters because it realigns AI infrastructure development toward Chinese hardware self-reliance, evidenced by DeepSeek's prior Nvidia collaborations and its models' 75 million+ Hugging Face downloads since January 2025.