DeepSeek hasn’t just disrupted OpenAI. Chinese tech giants are being upended too

DeepSeek’s advances have roiled global stock markets and AI players. Now, its influence is spreading quickly at home, with some of China’s biggest tech companies, many of which had been developing their own chatbots, racing to incorporate the open-source model into their own services.

DeepSeek’s advances have roiled global stock markets and AI players. Now, its influence is spreading quickly at home, with some of China’s biggest tech companies, many of which had been developing their own chatbots, racing to incorporate the open-source model into their own services. In early February telecoms giant Huawei said it would run DeepSeek on its own computing hardware composed of its Ascend computer processors, which are domestically produced. Some AI watchers have hailed this as a turning point, as it demonstrates that a high-performing model like DeepSeek no longer requires Nvidia’s most powerful chips to operate. “This partnership defies US sanctions by proving China can deliver globally competitive AI performance using domestically developed AI hardware and software stack, replacing Nvidia chips with Ascend chips,” analysts at Bernstein, an investment and research firm, wrote in a research note earlier this month. Starting in late 2022, the Biden Administration imposed several rounds of export controls on China in an effort to deprive the country of technology that Washington fears Beijing could use to make the next generation of weapons and AI systems. But the success of DeepSeek’s latest R1 AI model, which is said to be trained at a fraction of the cost of established players like ChatGPT, challenged the assumption that cutting off access to advanced chips could successfully stymie China’s progress.