China’s northern port city of Tianjin has become the latest local government to adopt the Chinese artificial intelligence system DeepSeek.
Advertisement
Thursday’s announcement by the Hebei district government signals China’s accelerating embrace of home-grown AI for both industrial and governance purposes, the official Tianjin Daily reported.
The Tianjin AI Computing Centre, which will host the system, is a collaboration between Hebei district and Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies launched in March 2023. It is the first facility in the wider region clustered around Beijing to fully integrate DeepSeek’s models, the report said.
The centre is equipped with Huawei’s domestically built 300-PFlop infrastructure – a measure of processing speed equivalent to 300 quadrillion calculations per second.
The DeepSeek models it hosts include its largest 671B-parameter system and six streamlined versions, allowing companies to “plug in and use” them without costly in-house servers, the report said.
Advertisement
Developed by a Chinese start-up, DeepSeek operates on an open-source framework unlike systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.