DeepSeek has brought China’s ‘Sputnik moment’

In the years since ChatGPT’s debut, the world of artificial intelligence development has been defined by a single obsession: scale. Companies have raced to build ever-larger models, train on datasets of unimaginable size, and spend billions on the infrastructure required to sustain this rapid growth. The logic has been simple: bigger is better.

The pursuit of scale has inflated the industry, driving massive valuations. Nvidia – the shovel and picks provider of this new age – rose to a trillion-dollar valuation fuelled by its GPUs being indispensable for AI development. Over the weekend, Meta announced plans for a data centre spanning half the size of Manhattan, further reinforcing the industry’s commitment to infrastructure-heavy strategies.

Last week, this mindset was epitomised by the announcement of the Stargate Project, a $500 billion (£400 billion) initiative to build the world’s largest AI infrastructure in Texas.