Trump says DeepSeek is a “wake-up call” for Silicon Valley

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday that he sees the recently-launched Chinese artificial intelligence model DeepSeek as a positive, and that it was a wake-up call for silicon valley.

Trump said he was optimistic on DeepSeek’s claims of a faster and “much less expensive method of AI,” stating that American companies were likely to follow suit.

“If it’s true, and nobody really knows if it is, I view that as a positive because you’ll be doing that too- so you won’t be spending as much and you’ll get the same result, hopefully,” Trump said when addressing Republican members of Congress at an event in Miami.

“The release of DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win,” Trump said.

Trump signed a flurry of executive orders in his first week in office, which included an order to scale back restrictions on AI development put in place by the Biden administration.

The President also announced $500 billion of private investment in building more AI infrastructure in the U.S.- a venture that will be led by OpenAI and Japan’s Softbank (OTC:SFTBY). Trump has vowed to further U.S. leadership in AI by pushing friendlier regulation of the industry and also attracting more private investment in AI.

DeepSeek rattled the U.S. AI industry with the release of its R1 model last week. The model claims to match competitors such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT in performance, but does so on older hardware and at a fraction of the cost.

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Concerns over the U.S. losing its dominance in AI sparked steep losses in major technology stocks on Monday. Chipmaker NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) was among the worst hit, losing nearly $600 billion in market capital in a day on concerns that leaner, more efficient AI models will require less investment in advanced chips and data centers.