China Telecom was the first telco to adopt DeepSeek with the launch of a full-stack DeepSeek-R1/V3 inferencing on its Xiran intelligent computing platform
Over the weekend, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) reported that the country’s big three — China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom — have successfully integrated DeepSeek models into their AI capabilities and infrastructure, and are now “fully connected” to the Chinese AI startup’s open source large language model (LLM).
DeepSeek made quite a splash when it released its open source R1 LLM, claiming capabilities on-par with OpenAI and, based on some details from a technical report published in December 2024, perhaps only spent around $6 million on its latest training run. This contrasts quite sharply with the billions spent (and projected to be spent) by Western firms like OpenAI.
China Telecom was the first of the big telcos to adopt DeepSeek with the early February launch of a full-stack DeepSeek-R1/V3 inferencing on its Xiran intelligent computing platform. Both China Telecom and China Unicom are offering services based on the startup’s reasoning model, called DeepSeek-R1, on their cloud computing platforms. China Mobile, the largest of the three telcos, is also integrating DeepSeek into its Mobile Cloud Intelligent Platform, offering full versions of DeepSeek V1, V2, V3 and R1.
Several other Chinese technology giants also already embraced DeepSeek R1 or V3 models in the past week, including Alibaba Group, Tencent Holdings and Baidu Inc. and Huawei Technologies.
In addition to the market shock that DeepSeek’s public announcement caused in the U.S. —financial markets responded sharply to the news with shares in ASML, Microsoft, NVIDIA and other AI specialists, and tech more broadly all taking a hit — a new report
discovered that the DeepSeek AI Chatbot could potentially transmit user login information to China Mobile. China Mobile is state-owned and has been banned from operating in the United States since 2019.
The claim comes from Feroot Security, a Canadian cybersecurity firm, which said it has identified obfuscated computer code within the web-based version of DeepSeek’s chatbot that connects to China Mobile’s infrastructure during the account creation and user login process. The firm’s CEO Ivan Tsarynny considers this a serious threat that shouldn’t be ignored, commenting: “You know that saying ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire’? In this instance, there’s a lot of smoke.”
