DeepSeek open-sources six Ascend components, with TileLang positioned against CUDA

DeepSeek said on Sept. 30 that it had open-sourced six infrastructure components built for Huawei’s Ascend platform, mirroring tools it had previously released for Nvidia systems. The most closely watched release is the Ascend version of TileLang, a compiler tool that wraps low-level Ascend C instructions and lets developers write with a higher-level programming model. DeepSeek explicitly frames it as a software layer comparable in function to Nvidia’s CUDA. The company said the TileLang approach was first validated on Nvidia hardware and already supports most operators used in training the DeepSeek V4 model family. It added that every TileLang operator currently used in its own training stack now has a high-performance implementation on Ascend. DeepSeek also said Huawei worked closely with it on a 128-chip supernode design based on Ascend 950, with optimization work covering both compute and communications. At the same time, DeepSeek’s GitHub README spells out several constraints behind the headline performance claims. The results were produced on an unpublished proof-of-concept hardware development kit and with a separate unpublished manual configuration. The company also noted that full bandwidth would require Huawei’s commercial Atlas 850E HDK, which is planned for mid-October 2026. Documentation for DeepEP says dispatch bandwidth can reach 90% to 95% of the physical limit when expert parallelism does not exceed 32, while larger-scale performance and combine operations are still being optimized.