South China Morning Post scmp.com Published: 5:00pm, 12 Aug 2025 - Chinese tech firms are leveraging software improvements to compensate for limited access to advanced hardware.
Huawei Technologies has unveiled a software tool designed to accelerate inference in large artificial intelligence models, an advancement that could help China reduce its reliance on expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips.
Unified Cache Manager (UCM) is an algorithm that allocates data according to varying latency requirements across different types of memories – including ultra-fast HBM, standard dynamic random access memory and solid-state drive – thereby enhancing inference efficiency, according to Huawei executives at the Financial AI Reasoning Application Landing and Development Forum in Shanghai on Tuesday.
Zhou Yuefeng, vice-president and head of Huawei’s data storage product line, said UCM demonstrated its effectiveness during tests, reducing inference latency by up to 90 per cent and increasing system throughput as much as 22-fold.
The move exemplifies how Chinese tech firms are leveraging software improvements to compensate for limited access to advanced hardware. Earlier this year, Chinese start-up DeepSeek captured global attention by developing powerful AI models with constrained chip resources.
Huawei plans to open-source UCM in September, first in its online developer community and later to the broader industry. The initiative could help China lessen its dependence on foreign-made HBM chips, a market mostly controlled by South Korea’s SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, as well as the US supplier Micron Technology.
HBM is a stacked, high-speed, low-latency memory that provides substantial data throughput to AI chips, enabling optimal performance. The global HBM market is projected to nearly double in revenue this year, reaching US$34 billion, and is expected to hit US$98 billion by 2030, largely driven by the AI boom, according to consulting firm Yole Group.
www.scmp.com - Heightened US chip export controls have prompted Chinese AI and chip companies to collaborate.
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.
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.
Germany's data protection commissioner has asked Apple and Google to remove Chinese AI startup DeepSeek from their app stores in the country due to concerns about data protection, following a similar crackdown elsewhere.
FRANKFURT, June 27 (Reuters) - Germany's data protection commissioner has asked Apple (AAPL.O), opens new tab and Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab to remove Chinese AI startup DeepSeek from their app stores in the country due to concerns about data protection, following a similar crackdown elsewhere.
Commissioner Meike Kamp said in a statement on Friday that she had made the request because DeepSeek illegally transfers users' personal data to China.
The two U.S. tech giants must now review the request promptly and decide whether to block the app in Germany, she added, though her office has not set a precise timeframe.
Google said it had received the notice and was reviewing it.
DeepSeek did not respond to a request for comment. Apple was not immediately available for comment.
According to its own privacy policy, opens new tab, DeepSeek stores numerous pieces of personal data, such as requests to its AI programme or uploaded files, on computers in China.
"DeepSeek has not been able to provide my agency with convincing evidence that German users' data is protected in China to a level equivalent to that in the European Union," Kamp said.
"Chinese authorities have far-reaching access rights to personal data within the sphere of influence of Chinese companies," she added.
AI firm DeepSeek is aiding China's military and intelligence operations, a senior U.S. official told Reuters, adding that the Chinese tech startup sought to use Southeast Asian shell companies to access high-end semiconductors that cannot be shipped to China under U.S. rules.
The U.S. conclusions reflect a growing conviction in Washington that the capabilities behind the rapid rise of one of China's flagship AI enterprises may have been exaggerated and relied heavily on U.S. technology.
Hangzhou-based DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the technology world in January, saying its artificial intelligence reasoning models were on par with or better than U.S. industry-leading models at a fraction of the cost.
"We understand that DeepSeek has willingly provided and will likely continue to provide support to China's military and intelligence operations," a senior State Department official told Reuters in an interview.
"This effort goes above and beyond open-source access to DeepSeek's AI models," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to speak about U.S. government information.
The U.S. government's assessment of DeepSeek's activities and links to the Chinese government have not been previously reported and come amid a wide-scale U.S.-China trade war.
Suspected cybercriminals have created a fake installer for Chinese AI model DeepSeek-R1 and loaded it with previously unknown malware called "BrowserVenom".
The malware’s name reflects its ability to redirect all traffic from browsers through an attacker-controlled server.
This enables the crooks to steal data, monitor browsing activity, and potentially expose plaintext traffic. Credentials for websites, session cookies, financial account info, plus sensitive emails and documents are therefore all at risk – just the sort of info scammers seek so they can commit digital fraud and/or sell to other miscreants.
To date, the malware has infected "multiple" computers across Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, India, Nepal, South Africa, and Egypt. Kaspersky, which spotted a phishing campaign that spreads the malware by sending victims to a fake website that resembles the real DeepSeek homepage, said it continues to "pose a global threat.”
While the malware used in this campaign is new, the tactic of using interest in AI to spread nasty payloads is increasingly common.
Such campaigns use phishing sites whose domain names differ slightly from those operated by real AI vendors, and criminals use malicious ads and other tactics, so they appear prominently in search engine results. But instead of delivering the promised chatbot or AI tool, they infect unwitting victims with everything from credential- and wallet-stealing malware to ransomware and Windows-borking code.
This campaign used the URL https[:]//deepseek-platform[.]com.
The crims promoted that address to many potential victims by buying ads from Google, so it appeared as the top result when users searched for "deepseek r1".
Evaluation of three jailbreaking techniques on DeepSeek shows risks of generating prohibited content. Evaluation of three jailbreaking techniques on DeepSeek shows risks of generating prohibited content.
Amid ongoing fears over TikTok, Chinese generative AI platform DeepSeek says it’s sending heaps of US user data straight to its home country, potentially setting the stage for greater scrutiny.
A publicly accessible database belonging to DeepSeek allowed full control over database operations, including the ability to access internal data. The exposure includes over a million lines of log streams with highly sensitive information.
