SHANGHAI, Feb 5 (Reuters) - Chinese companies, from chip

makers to cloud service providers, are rushing to support

DeepSeek's artificial intelligence models, spurring analysts to

hail a "watershed moment" for the industry.

Moore Threads and Hygon Information Technology,

which makes AI chips and looks to compete with Nvidia, said on

Monday their computing clusters and accelerators would be able

to support DeepSeek's R1 and V3 models.

"We pay tribute to DeepSeek," Moore Threads headlined its

post on WeChat, adding that progress by the firm's models using

domestically made graphic processing units (GPU) could "set on

fire" China's AI industry.

On Saturday, Huawei Technologies, which also has

its own line of AI chips, said it was working with AI

infrastructure start-up SiliconFlow to make DeepSeek's models

available to customers on its Ascend cloud service.

Their performance was comparable to models run on global,

high-end chips, it added.

The news that Huawei had integrated DeepSeek's models with

its Ascend chips marked a "watershed moment," Bernstein analysts

said in a note on Sunday.

"DeepSeek demonstrates that competitive large language

models (LLM) can be deployed on China's 'good enough' chips,

easing reliance on cutting-edge U.S. hardware"," they added,

citing Ascend and planned chips from Cambricon and Hygon.

Alibaba ( BABA ), Baidu ( BIDU ) and Tencent's ( TCTZF )

cloud arms have also said they have made DeepSeek's models

accessible via their services.

Last month, DeepSeek launched a free AI assistant that it

says uses less data at a fraction of the cost of existing

services.

Within a few days, its app overtook U.S. rival ChatGPT in

downloads from Apple's App Store, triggering a global selloff in

tech shares.

Earlier the company earlier drew attention in global AI

circles with a research paper in December that said the training

of DeepSeek-V3 required less than $6 million worth of computing

power from Nvidia's H800 chips, versus the billions of dollars

spent by the likes of tech giants Meta and Microsoft ( MSFT ).

China has welcomed its success, turning the startup based in

the eastern city of Hangzhou, and the firm's founder, Liang

Wenfeng, into pop culture celebrities.

Microsoft ( MSFT ) and Amazon's ( AMZN ) cloud services have

also started offering DeepSeek's models but several countries

such as Italy and the Netherlands have blocked, or are

investigating, DeepSeek's AI app on concerns of privacy.