In China's push to reduce dependence on American artificial intelligence technology, DeepSeek announced it has developed software tools for chips made by Huawei Technologies. The partnership targets one of the biggest obstacles to China's ambitions to build a homegrown A. I. industry — software that can extract the best performance from its chips.

Advanced semiconductors alone are not enough to power A. I. systems. Computer hardware and chip-level software must work together for artificial intelligence to do anything useful.

Though China is catching up, Silicon Valley companies remain leaders in A. I. technology, with Nvidia, whose chips power the most advanced A. I. systems, at the forefront.

Nvidia's dominance rests on more than chips. The company also benefits from having an estimated four million software developers worldwide who use CUDA, a software platform for Nvidia chips. DeepSeek presented its work with Huawei as a potential alternative to CUDA.

DeepSeek said its programming language, Tile Lang, was designed to meet that challenge, offering 'a simpler programming model' than Nvidia's CUDA. The company said the version of Tile Lang it designed for Huawei's A. I. chips was open source.

DeepSeek said it tested the programming language on older Nvidia chips and now uses Tile Lang as the 'core tool' for working on artificial general intelligence. Huawei executives also said the company could not meet China's demand for A. I. chips and related equipment and planned to restrict overseas sales as it prioritized its domestic market. 'We cannot accept a destiny where we cannot control our fate,' Eric Xu, Huawei's current chairman, said at the conference.