Chinese AI startup DeepSeek sends shockwaves through Wall Street

globalnews.ca:

Wall Street is tumbling Monday on fears that the market’s winners who have feasted on the artificial-intelligence frenzy are under threat from a competitor in China that can do similar things for much cheaper.

The S&P 500 was down 1.6% in morning trading. Big Tech stocks took some of the heaviest losses, with Nvidia down 11.2%, and they dragged the Nasdaq composite down 2.7%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which has less of an emphasis on tech, was holding up better with a dip of 123 points, or 0.3%, as of 9:50 a.m. Eastern time.

The shock to financial markets came from China, where a company called DeepSeek said it had developed a large language model that can compete with U.S. giants but at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek’s app had already hit the top of Apple’s App Store chart by early Monday morning, and analysts said such a feat would be particularly impressive given how the U.S. government has restricted Chinese access to top AI chips.

Skepticism, though, remains about how much DeepSeek’s announcement will ultimately shake the AI supply chain, from the chip makers making semiconductors to the utilities hoping to electrify vast data centers running those chips.

“It remains to be seen if DeepSeek found a way to work around these chip restrictions rules and what chips they ultimately used as there will be many skeptics around this issue given the information is coming from China,” according to Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities.

DeepSeek’s disruption nevertheless rocked stock markets worldwide.

In Amsterdam, Dutch chip supplier ASML slid 8.5%. In Tokyo, Japan’s Softbank Group Corp. lost 8.3% and is nearly back to where it was before spurting on an announcement that it was joining a partnership trumpeted