Donald Trump has issued a warning to the US tech industry after one company suffered the biggest single-day stock market loss in history.
On Monday, chip giant Nvidia lost nearly $600bn (£482bn) on the Wall Street stock market, with a number of other major tech firms suffering sharp losses.
This came after the emergence of Chinese company DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence model, which the company claims was developed at a fraction of the cost of its American rivals.
This has raised doubts about how dominant the US really is in the AI industry and the scale of investments planned by American companies.
DeepSeek has become the most downloaded free app in the US in the week after it was launched. The company says it trained its open source DeepSeek-V3 model for just $6m (£4.2m). By comparison, US companies have spent billions on AI models.
In response to the dramatic stock market losses suffered by the likes of Nvidia, Trump has said this is a “wake-up call” for the industry, the BBC reports.
However, he added that the advances in China’s AI industry could be a “positive” thing for America.
He told reporters on Air Force One: “If you could do it cheaper, if you could do it [for] less [and] get to the same end result. I think that’s a good thing for us.”
The president added he was not concerned about DeepSeek’s breakthrough, which has come as the US restricting the sale of the advanced chip technology used by AI in China.
On X, some have pointed out that this sort of thing was exactly what Kamala Harris warned against during the presidential election last year.
Hindsight’s a fine thing isn’t it…
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