Essay by Eric Worrall

Green energy is dead – China just fired the opening shot in a new high energy cold war race to build the ultimate AI.

DeepSeek’s tech breakthrough hailed in China as answer to win AI war

‘We should have confidence that China will eventually win the AI war with the US,’ Qihoo 360’s Zhou Hongyi said in a Weibo post

Ben Jiangin Beijing and Bien Perezin Hong Kong

Published: 12:00pm, 28 Jan 2025Updated: 1:25pm, 28 Jan 2025

DeepSeek, extolled by some as the “biggest dark horse” in the open-source large language model (LLM) arena, now has a bull’s eye on its back, as the start-up is being touted as China’s secret weapon in the artificial intelligence (AI) war with the US.

The Hangzhou-based company sent shock waves across Wall Street and Silicon Valley for developing AI models at a fraction of the cost compared with OpenAI and Meta Platforms, which prompted US President Donald Trump to call the breakthrough a “wake-up call” and “positive” for America’s tech sector.

At home, Chinese tech executives and various commentators rushed to hail DeepSeek’s disruptive power.

Zhou Hongyi, co-founder, chairman and chief executive of Chinese cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360, declared that DeepSeek has “upended the world” in a recent video posted on his Weibo account, after the start-up’s release of two powerful new AI models – built at a lower cost and with less computing resources than what larger tech firms typically need for LLM development.

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Read more: https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3296503/deepseeks-tech-breakthrough-hailed-china-answer-win-ai-war

The impact of this breakthrough on the US tech landscape has been dramatic;

Nvidia sheds almost $600 billion in market cap, biggest one-day loss in U.S. history

PUBLISHED MON, JAN 27 20254:08 PM ESTUPDATED MON, JAN 27 20255:26 PM EST

Samantha Subin@SAMANTHA_SUBIN

• Nvidia shares plunged 17% on Monday, resulting in a market cap loss of close to $600 billion, the biggest drop ever for a U.S. company.
• The sell-off, which hit much of the U.S. tech sector, was sparked by concerns about increased competition from Chinese AI lab DeepSeek.
• Data center companies that rely on Nvidia chips also plummeted, with Dell, Oracle and Super Micro Computer all falling by at least 8.7%.

Nvidia lost close to $600 billion in market cap on Monday, the biggest drop for any company on a single day in U.S. history.

The chipmaker’s stock price plummeted 17% to close at $118.58. It was Nvidia’s worst day on the market since March 16, 2020, which was early in the Covid pandemic. After Nvidia surpassed Apple last week to become the most valuable publicly traded company, the stock’s drop Monday led a 3.1% slide in the tech-heavy Nasdaq.

The sell-off was sparked by concerns that Chinese artificial intelligence lab DeepSeek is presenting increased competition in the global AI battle. In late December, DeepSeek unveiled a free, open-source large language model that it said took only two months and less than $6 million to build, using reduced-capability chips from Nvidia called H800s. 

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Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/27/nvidia-sheds-almost-600-billion-in-market-cap-biggest-drop-ever.html

Back in December I predicted 2025 would be the year of the gigawatt AI project, and suggested China was getting into the AI game in a big way, though details were sparse. This observation has now been confirmed by the DeepSeek announcement.

My research back in December also suggested China has an edge in this race, because of their vast surplus of fossil fuel energy. China’s construction slowdown has left lots of surplus energy and industrial capacity looking for a use. AI could be the ticket to soak up that spare capacity.

The USA’s only hope of catching up with China is to match China’s access to energy, by cost, stability and quantity. Because one thing AI needs more than anything is gigawatts of rock stable dedicated capacity. On the energy front, the USA is so far behind the game, it will take the USA years to level up even to China’s current capacity on this most critical metric.

Where is the room in this new AI space race for energy conservation, expensive renewables, and impractical battery storage?

The USA better get this right, because the USA is the only power which can hope to match China’s AI research resources.

US AI companies are rising to the challenge. President Trump recently gave his backing to the Stargate Project, a $500 billion collaboration by US AI companies, which some people are describing as an AI Manhattan Project.

Britain and Europe have expressed interest in AI, but for the foreseeable future there is no point taking such announcements seriously. Right now both are so energy poor they are not even on the map. Until they set their house in order, and ditch their green fantasies, Britain and Europe will continue to be spectators to the greatest tech revolution in human history.

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars in resources being advanced by favourites to win the AI race, there are other players whose outstanding achievements qualify them as contenders.

India is a big player in the AI game – they have the energy resources and people power to match China’s AI push, and have long been a software and computing titan, thanks to their government’s long standing policy of zero tax on offshore IT industry income, and special low tax high tech economic zones. The large scale presence of Indian immigrants in Silicon Valley is also testament to India’s tech prowess – no doubt India will attempt in coming years to lure top Indian Silicon Valley IT people to return home, to participate in India’s AI tech race. I fully expect India to make a similar AI announcement to China in the coming year.

Israel is solid a contender, their AI battlefield technology is world class. But it remains to be seen whether the Israeli economy can muster the resources required for a serious attempt to build the first artificial general intelligence.

There is one other contender worth mentioning – Turkey. Despite ongoing Turkish economic and political instability, Turkey has a surprisingly robust high tech manufacturing sector, with a solid track record of high tech achievement. During the recent Libyan civil war, which Turkey and Russia turned into a high tech weapons showcase by arming opposing factions, Turkey decisively defeated Russia’s world class drone jamming system by creating the world’s first autonomous terminator robot, an AI attack robot which does not need a control signal. Turkey might be the 100 to one outsider when it comes to the race to build the world’s first AI super intelligence, but given unlocking the secret to building the first artificial super intelligence might require brains rather than brawn, a theoretical breakthrough rather than global superpower scale investment, Turkey cannot be completely discounted as a contender.

There are other players which in the future might become significant, such as Nigeria, which is becoming a serious presence in the high tech field, Japan, with a long history of AI pioneering, AI powered animatronics and other advanced technologies, and Iran, which is quietly upping its skills base by supplying high tech weapons to Russia. But I do not believe these players are treating the AI arms race as a serious enough national priority to be true contenders, though I might be mistaken about Japan.

One thing is clear. The USA has hesitated too long to put all the required stepping stones in place, and has a lot of catchup to do. The USA’s energy shortfall relative to China could cripple US efforts to keep up with China’s AI push, unless this shortfall is remedied in the near future.

If you want to know why AI needs so much energy, this article delves into how AI works;