On Monday, Chinese startup DeepSeek fell victim to a massive cyberattack that coincided with its powerful influence on global financial markets. This was reported by Reuters.
“Due to malicious attacks on DeepSeek services, registration may be temporarily unavailable. Registered users can log in as usual. Thank you for your understanding and support,” the company said in a statement.
DeepSeek is a new challenge for US technological leadership
DeepSeek has attracted global attention for its revolutionary artificial intelligence(AI) models, which the company claims outperform their US counterparts in terms of performance and are significantly cheaper to use. Their DeepSeek-R1 assistant, launched on 20 January, quickly became the most downloaded app in the US, overtaking ChatGPT in the App Store.
This has caused significant concern in Silicon Valley and a collapse in the shares of American AI companies. In particular:
- Nvidia lost 16.2% of its capitalisation, the biggest drop since March 2020;
- Micron and Arm Holdings fell by over 10% and 9%, respectively;
- Broadcom and AMD lost 16% and 6%.
In Europe and Asia, shares of large semiconductor manufacturers such as ASML, Advantest, and Tokyo Electron also went down.
How is DeepSeek changing the AI market?
DeepSeek stated that it spent only $5.58 million to train the DeepSeek-V3 model using Nvidia H800 chips, which is significantly cheaper than the US equivalents. Their systems are 20-50 times more efficient than OpenAI solutions.
However, experts doubt the reliability of this data, suggesting that the company may have used limited amounts of chips that are banned for export to China.
Political aspect and strategic importance
The strong development of DeepSeek has become an important factor in China’s strategy to achieve technological independence. The government actively supports the company, which could become a key element in the competition with Washington in the field of artificial intelligence.
