This Monday the stock markets of the United States and Europe, and in particular the stocks associated with the technology sector, suffered an earthquake with the fall of several of the main companies. And the person responsible was a new artificial intelligence (AI) china.
DeepSeeka startup The Asian country, barely a year after its creation, presented an AI model similar to ChatGPT, called R1, with all the known capabilities, but with a striking distinction: its cost is much lower than the models of large American companies.
The Chinese company claims to have spent less than $6 million training its newest AI model, a far cry from the hundreds of millions or billions used by OpenAI, Google or Meta.
Furthermore, its model is open source, so anyone can examine it, modify it and develop it according to their needs, something that has generated a notable impact on the developer community. refers the agency EFE.
The emergence of DeepSeek-R1 has been such that it has placed itself in first place in the lists of free downloads of the App Store mobile application store in both China and the United States, surpassing the most popular models until now, including ChatGPT.
Its launch occurs almost in parallel with the announcement of the so-called Stargate project by Donald Trump, which will invest $500 billion over the next four years to build new data centers to support AI projects in the United States.
Marc Andreessen, one of the world’s top tech investors and a Trump supporter, called DeepSeek “one of the most amazing and impressive advances I’ve ever seen.” highlights cnn.
Deepseek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen — and as open source, a profound gift to the world.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 24, 2025
In the opinion of the American media, “the surprising achievement of a relatively unknown artificial intelligence startup is even more shocking when you consider that the United States has been working for years to restrict the supply of high-powered artificial intelligence chips to China, citing security concerns. national”.
“That means,” he emphasizes. cnn— that DeepSeek was able to achieve its low-cost model on low-power AI chips.”
KEYS | DeepSeek, the open source Chinese AI that challenges American hegemony.https://t.co/JCNLwaQtu8 pic.twitter.com/ykTdPhcFsX
— EFE News (@EFEnoticias) January 27, 2025
Fall in the stock markets
Thanks to the surprise emergence of DeepSeek-R1, US technology stocks plummeted on the stock exchanges this Monday morning.
Nvidia, the main supplier of artificial intelligence chips and considered the most valuable company in the world, fell 12% in pre-market operations, and once the stock markets were open it continued its fall. Its losses have been placed at more than 600 billion, the largest drop in value in the history of the Stock Market.
Other technology giants such as Meta, Alphabet – Google’s parent company – Marvell, Broadcom, Palantir and Oracle also suffered significant falls.
These heavy losses also had a downward impact on the main indices such as the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq.
The fall in the United States also affected the European stock markets and the Euro Stoxx50, an index in which the largest capitalization European companies are listed. Likewise, companies such as the Dutch chip machine manufacturer ASML, Schneider Electric and Siemens, among others, were impacted.
For Keith Lerner, market analyst cited by cnn“the implementation of the DeepSeek model is leading investors to question the leadership that American companies have and how much is being spent and whether that spending will generate profits.”
In any case, analysts estimate that it is still early to gauge the impact of the new Chinese AI in terms of permanence, and they see a massive change of customers as unlikely, at least for now. But what seems clear is that the competition is underway and this sector is also now a new field of struggle in the geopolitical dispute between Beijing and Washington.
