So much for the quiet pre-holiday trading session as Asian equities were mixed though Australia was closed for Australia Day, Indonesia was closed for Al Isra’ wal-Mi’raj, South Korea was closed for the Korean New Year,

A frenzy over an artificial intelligence chatbot made by Chinese tech startup DeepSeek was upending stock markets Monday and fueling debates over the economic and geopolitical competition between the U.

DeepSeek topped the Apple App Store over the weekend, and R1 had already cracked the top 10 of the UC Berkeley leader board Chatbot Arena, a ranking of the top-performing AI assis

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.

Some AI researchers hailed DeepSeek’s R1 as a breakthrough on the same level as DeepMind’s AlphaZero, a 2017 model that became superhuman at the board games Chess and Go by purely playing against itself and improving, rather than observing any human games.

The Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek has rattled markets with claims its latest AI model performs on a par with those of OpenAI, despite using less advanced, more energy efficient compute

Nvidia shares closed down almost 17%, posting its biggest drop since March 2020 and erasing nearly $600 billion from the company's market cap. Broadcom fell 17.4%, and other chip stocks like Micron declined 11.

Silicon Valley and Washington leaders said the app shows China can challenge the U.S. The Nasdaq lost 3 percent and chipmaker Nvidia shed $589 billion in market capitalization.

News from China upset U.S. markets Monday and disrupted the frenzy that had built up around artificial intelligence