Matt Armitage and Richard Bradbury explore the rise of DeepSeek and its seismic impact on financial markets. Since its launch in January 2025, the Chinese AI assistant has surpassed ChatGPT in downloads, offering similarly high-quality responses at zero cost.

Nvidia, a key player in AI hardware, Microsoft, Google, and other major AI stakeholders have seen their market values drop in response to the app. So how did a relatively small startup create an AI assistant for US$5m that can rival the multibillion dollar models of the market leaders? And how did the smart money in Silicon Valley.

Forget the geopolitics. This is David and Goliath. Small versus large. And it’s anyone’s guess who will win.