“Investor assumptions about the dominance of U.S. technology leaders were challenged last week following the release of a new research paper by China’s AI startup DeepSeek. The company’s latest R1 large language model chatbot was able to deliver comparable performance with top U.S. firms in coding, reasoning and problem solving, despite reportedly being developed at a fraction of the cost, consuming much less power and using fewer processing resources. The news sparked a major Equity selloff in the U.S. Technology sector, particularly among upstream segments of the AI supply chain, including a record one-day market capitalization loss of close to $600 billion for a leading provider of high-end semiconductors. But does the DeepSeek moment spell an end for the AIdriven market advance of recent years? And how might its ripple effects change the broader outlook for global equity markets in 2025 and beyond?”
Morten W. Langer