DeepSeek CEO says China can break its Nvidia dependence within a year

DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng reportedly told investors that China’s move off Nvidia hardware has hit a turning point and that the last thing standing in the way is chip supply, which he believes should no longer be an issue within a year.

DeepSeek is currently raising outside funding for the first time, and its founder’s statement is attributed to minutes from a recent investor meeting. However, neither Liang nor the company has confirmed the document.

Where is China still trailing the West in the chip race?

According to Liang, “The biggest gap between us and the US lies in resources,” tying differences in talent, model quality, and applications back to raw computing power.

Chinese firms cannot buy Nvidia’s top chips freely; they spend less on AI overall and put a smaller slice of that money toward people.

Speaking on the scale of the gap, Liang put the largest frontier models from the West at about 800 billion active parameters against tens of billions for China’s best, which is roughly a tenfold spread.

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