- A social media post by an industry insider suggests the highly anticipated DeepSeek V4 large model is highly likely to be officially released this week.
- The next-generation model is expected to be deeply integrated with domestic chips like Huawei's Ascend.
Chinese AI star DeepSeek's highly anticipated next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) model is expected to be released later this week, after a tweet from an industry insider sparked widespread attention.
Yifan Zhang, a researcher at Princeton University's AI lab, posted a cryptic tweet saying "V4, next week." on social media platform X on Sunday. The post quickly triggered widespread market speculation and intense interest, with the industry widely viewing it as a teaser for DeepSeek.
V4, next week.
— Yifan Zhang (@yifan_zhang_) April 19, 2026
Zhang previously worked at ByteDance, and his core research areas cover cutting-edge technologies including large language model reasoning and reinforcement learning.
His public statement has renewed expectations ahead of the DeepSeek V4 model's anticipated official launch later this month.
As of now, DeepSeek has not publicly responded to media inquiries regarding whether the V4 model will officially launch this week.
According to previous reports by domestic media, DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng revealed plans to release the next-generation model in April during a recent internal communication.
This next-generation flagship model, highly anticipated by the tech community, is expected to feature a trillion-parameter scale and support a million-level context window processing capability.
More importantly, the upcoming V4 model is expected to achieve deep technical adaptation and integration with domestic AI computing chips such as Huawei's Ascend for the first time.
This technological breakthrough marks a critical step for China's AI industry in breaking away from its traditional ecosystem reliance on Nvidia.
In preparation for the official release of the V4 model, domestic tech giants including Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent have begun actively laying out their underlying computing infrastructure.
These leading enterprises have pre-ordered hundreds of thousands of next-generation AI computing chips, driving up the market price of related chips by about 20% recently.
While optimizing its software architecture, DeepSeek has also begun to directly enter the asset-heavy physical computing infrastructure sector.
The company is currently planning to build a large-scale data center in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, in northern China, to meet the massive and growing computing power demands of future model iterations.
As the marginal returns of algorithmic innovation begin to diminish, possessing large-scale and highly efficient physical data centers has become a core competitive element for AI companies in the current landscape.
At the end of March this year, the DeepSeek platform experienced a system crash lasting nearly 12 hours, further highlighting the computing power bottlenecks currently facing the entire industry.
As a countermeasure, the platform introduced a tiered design on the product side for the first time in early April, officially launching two interactive modes: "quick mode" and "expert mode."
