When Chinese quant hedge fund founder Liang Wenfeng went into AI research, he took 10,000 Nvidia chips and assembled a team of young, ambitious talent. Two years later, DeepSeek exploded on the scene.

The company built a cheaper, competitive chatbot with fewer high-end computer chips than U.S. behemoths like Google and OpenAI, showing the limits of chip export control.

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek shakes up Silicon Valley with top-performing language model, challenging American tech dominance.