Chinese chipmaker Sophgo has adapted its compute card to power DeepSeek’s reasoning model, underscoring growing efforts by local firms to develop home-grown artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and reduce dependence on foreign chips amid tightening US export controls.
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Sophgo’s SC11 FP300 compute card successfully passed verification, showing stable and effective performance in executing the reasoning tasks of DeepSeek’s R1 model in tests conducted by the China Telecommunication Technology Labs (CTTL), the company said in a statement on Monday.
A compute card is a compact module that integrates a processor, memory and other essential components needed for computing tasks, often used in applications like AI.
CTTL is a research laboratory under the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, an organisation affiliated with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
The verification marked a milestone for Sophgo, affirming that its compute card supported domestic AI models in alignment with Beijing’s initiative to bolster its leading AI systems, such as the DeepSeek models, with self-developed infrastructure, the chipmaker said.
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Sophgo attributed the progress to several innovations in the FP300 compute card, which was released last year. In particular, it features 256 gigabytes of high-bandwidth memory and offers up to 1.1 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth, enabling faster data transfer during model training and execution.