July 7 (Reuters) – Chinese startup DeepSeek is developing its own AI chip, according to three people familiar with the matter, a ​push that could reduce its reliance on Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab and Huawei chips, which it has depended on to train and run its globally popular models.

The chip is designed ‌for inference — the stage of AI computing in which a trained model generates responses for users — rather than for training new models, the sources said.