Artificial intelligence: Chinese AI start-up lets tech shares sag

Großinvestor Marc Andreessen’s voice is very important in Silicon Valley, California. A post from Andreessen on the platform X about the Chinese Ki start-up deepseek from last Friday triggered shock waves that were felt on Monday in the German Stock Exchange in Frankfurt.

Andreessen had written that Deepseek was one of the “most impressive breakthroughs” that he had ever seen.

In addition, the star investor described the success of the new Chinese AI model as the “Sputnik moment of the AI” and made a comparison with the success of the Soviet Union, which surprised on October 4, 1957 with the first artificial earth satellite “Sputnik” the western world .

The exuberant praise quickly got around: In the Apple app store for the iPhone and iPad, Deepseek climbed to first place on the free applications over the weekend-and thus pushed Chatgpt from Openai in second place.

The reaction of the stock exchange was violent: Above all, the share of the AI ​​chip specialist Nvidia stumbled and lost by around 12 percent on Monday. The papers of the Dutch ASML group, the world’s largest provider of lithograph systems for the semiconductor industry, gave up by over eight percent. The software giant Microsoft, which is closely linked to the California Ki start-up Openai (Chatgpt), decreased by almost four percent.

The quake also reached Frankfurt stock exchange, also because suppliers for data centers such as Siemens Energy (minus 19 percent) and Schneider Electronic from France (minus 9 percent) were hit hard. In this country, shares from the chip industry continued to drop. In this way, more than four percent lost in the DAX Infineon. For the papers of Siltronic, Jenoptik and Aixtron, the MDAX went down between a good three and more than eight percent. As a clear bottom in the SDAX secondary index, Suss Microtec broke up by a good twelve percent.

Memory of the Dotcom bubble

Some observers even felt reminded of the bursting of the dotcom bubble in March 2000 when the great supplier, such as the server manufacturer Cisco, crashed because the business models had proven to be unable to use.

25 years after the overheated boom in the Dotcom economy, hardly anyone today denies that applications of artificial intelligence, legal system, healthcare and society will generally change comprehensively. The success of Deepseek, however, raises the question of whether the transformation in a AI society is not more cost-efficient because less powerful AI chips may be sufficient to create successful AI models.

If the models from Deepseek are really so convincing and need less performance, maybe no 500 billion-US dollar data centers-like the AI ​​project “Stargate” that US President Donald Trump only announced a few days ago had.

In any case, experts were surprised that Deepseek had managed to achieve a comparable performance like the AI ​​models of US competitors Openai and Meta, and supposedly need far fewer high-performance chips. It also did not matter that the search results of Deepseek were clearly shaped by the Chinese censorship and, for example, did not deliver search results for the Tian’anmen massacre in June 1989 at the heavenly peace.

“Suddenly all the high ratings could no longer be justified and suddenly none of the stock exchange is interested in the great promises of the new US President Donald Trump to invest another $ 500 billion in the AI ​​hype,” wrote capital market strategist Jürgen Molnar from the Robomarkets Handelshaus. Deepseek could be the answer to the customs threats from Washington.