DeepSeek has reopened access to its core programming interface after nearly three weeks of suspension. It is restarting a service key to wider adoption of an AI model that’s proven remarkably popular since its emergence last month.
The Chinese AI firm suspended top-ups in early February because of capacity shortages. However, they are back up and running, allowing customers to top up credits for use on its application programming interface.
However, in a verified company group chat, a DeepSeek representative said that the server resources will remain strained during the daytime.
The company has shown great resilience even after hostility from governments in different nations. As AI competition persists, DeepSeek said it would share important code and data with the public. This is an odd move to share more of its core technology than competitors like OpenAI have done.
Competition within China’s emerging AI industry deepens
Alibaba declared plans to open-source QwQ-Max. This has intensified the competition between DeepSeek and other developers, from Baidu Inc. (BIDU) to startups like Zhipu.
The Qwen team said that the QwQ-Max-Preview had better and more flexible problem-solving and reasoning skills. It was based on the most advanced model in the line, the Qwn 2.5-Max, which came out last month. The trial model for the Qwen chatbot is now free to use on the website.
The Qwen team said it would also open-source the base version of Qwen 2.5 Max. The team said, “We are committed to democratizing access to advanced reasoning capabilities and fostering innovation across diverse applications.” In addition, it would also release a mobile app for the Qwen chatbot soon.
Qwen’s latest reasoning model is part of a type of AI system that tries to copy how humans think, make choices, and solve problems. This comes after Alibaba announced a mega AI infrastructure plan.
Alibaba announced that it would spend $53 billion over the next three years on cloud and AI infrastructure. This is China’s biggest private business-funded computer project to date. Local companies in many fields, as well as government agencies, will rush to adopt DeepSeek’s open-source R1 thinking model. This will make the domestic AI market more competitive.
Alibaba also plans to share a number of smaller open-source reasoning models because more people want solutions that are lighter, use fewer resources, and can be used on several devices.
At the same time that the company released QwQ-Max-Preview, its competition across the street, DeepSeek, made five of its code repositories public for a whole week. The startup released two projects in the first two days that tried to get the most out of each chip for model training and inference jobs that didn’t cost a lot of money. The competition is stiff.
Nvidia H20 chips orders surge from the China market
According to reports, Chinese companies are placing more orders for Nvidia’s H20 AI chip because DeepSeek’s cheap AI models are so popular. As a result, a rise in sales has been recorded. This shows how dominant Nvidia is in the market and could ease worries that DeepSeek could lead to a drop in demand for AI chips.
Nori Chiou, investment director at Singapore-based White Oak Capital Partners, said, “When DeepSeek launched, many misjudged that computing power demand might stagnate or decrease. In reality, more advanced AI models drive deeper integration into daily life, exponentially increasing inference-level compute need.”
Orders, H20 chips are now common in China because Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance have also been ordering. The H20 chip is specific to China due to US export controls.
A source at one of China’s biggest server makers said that smaller businesses in fields like education and healthcare are also buying AI servers with DeepSeek models and Nvidia H20 chips.
However, this might not last long. Reports say that US President Donald Trump’s government is considering making it harder to sell the H20 chip to China. The sources said that DeepSeek was the reason for the rise in orders, even though the fear of more controls could have played a role.
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