Earlier this year, in a conference room at the Nairobi headquarters of a social impact startup named Qhala, a group of executives from tech firms across the continent gathered to hear a presentation about the promise of AI. The speaker was Harrison Li, chief solutions architect for Huawei Cloud in sub-Saharan Africa, and the subject was DeepSeek, a buzzy new entrant in the global artificial-intelligence race.
Huawei Technologies Co. and DeepSeek’s parent, High-Flyer, started collaborating a couple years ago, and now, Huawei is bundling access to the large language model with its own storage and cloud computing services. Li’s pitch is that China’s DeepSeek is capable of matching Silicon Valley’s OpenAI for a fraction of the cost and it can run on less-expensive hardware.