The developer of the chatbot that shocked U.S. incumbents had access to Nvidia chips that its parent company providentially acquired just before a 2022 U.S. export ban.

The emergence of DeepSeek came shortly after President Trump unveiled his "Stargate" project to invest $500bn in advancing AI.

Top White House advisers this week expressed alarm that China's DeepSeek may have benefited from a method that allegedly piggybacks off the advances of US rivals called "distillation."

Leading the swing were Apple and Nvidia, both Silicon Valley giants with significant dealings in China, as shares of Apple went from as much as a 4% morning gain to a 2% daily loss by late afternoon, and Nvidia stock turned what was as much as a 3% gain to a 3% daily drop.

DeepSeek has launched an AI model that was reportedly developed with significantly less computational power than traditional methods. Shares of Nvidia are under pressure amid concerns that DeepSeek's methods may undermine demand for its high-performance GPUs.

DeepSeek stunned the tech world with the release of its R1 "reasoning" model, matching or exceeding OpenAI's reasoning model for a fraction of the cost.

U.S. President Donald Trump and the CEO of Nvidia Jensen Huang discussed DeepSeek - the Chinese company whose AI model's performance rocked the tech world - and tightening AI chip exports during their meeting at the White House on Friday,

U.S. officials are investigating whether Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek skirted American export restrictions on advanced chip sales and bought advanced Nvidia (NVDA) semiconductors through third parties in Singapore,