While DeepSeek’s AI affair seems more political than technological, here is a closer look at the design engineering aspects.

Chinese tech champion Huawei has emerged as Nvidia’s primary competitor in China for inference chips. The Financial Times has previously reported that it has been working with AI companies, including DeepSeek, to adapt models trained on Nvidia GPUs to run inference on its Ascend chips.

US tech giant Nvidia lost over a sixth of its value after the surging popularity of a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) app spooked investors in the US and Europe. DeepSeek, a Chinese AI chatbot reportedly made at a fraction of the cost of its rivals, launched last week but has already become the most downloaded free app in the US.

Barrett Woodside, co-founder of the San Francisco AI hardware company Positron, said he and his colleagues have been abuzz about DeepSeek.

Global investors are worried the emergence of a low-cost Chinese AI model will threaten the dominance of AI leaders.

U.S.-listed shares of tech giants are gaining some lost ground this morning after a China-based startup shocked the AI world with a powerful LLM. Yesterday, shockwaves rippled across the American tech industry after news spread over the weekend about a powerful new large language model (LLM) from China called DeepSeek.