History won’t remember who led the race—it’ll record who buried the competition.
Washington’s playbook—sanction, threaten, repeat—has backfired spectacularly. While America’s busy chasing shiny objects and get-rich-quick schemes, China is laying the train tracks for the next industrial revolution.
They spat on it, called it a cheap “Made in China” knockoff. Another imitation. DeepSeek, a Chinese startup, claims to have achieved what many thought impossible: matching OpenAI’s capabilities at a fraction of the cost. And the best part? It’s open source. They can try to ban it; they can cry “national security”, but they can’t stop it. The weights are public. Anyone can run it. This isn’t a product they can just ban; it’s an idea and a movement. They tried to bury Huawei with baseless accusations and bans, hiding behind the “national security” while their own backdoors gaped wide open. Huawei offered transparency, opened its code, and the US, terrified of the truth, refused. Now, DeepSeek has ripped the mask off, exposing their hypocrisy to the world. The future of AI is here; it’s open.
While US AI firms obsess over billion-parameter models, DeepSeek’s hyper-efficient architectures are proliferating across Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Vietnam’s largest bank now runs Chinese LLMs at 1/20th the cost of Microsoft Azure. The lesson? When you democratize pricing, you rewrite the rules of digital colonialism.
Factor | OpenAI O1 | DeepSeek R1 |
---|---|---|
Cost | $15/M tokens | $0.55/M tokens (27x cheaper) |
Licensing | Proprietary | Open-source (MIT) |
Architecture | 200K context reasoning | MoE activates 37B/token |
Math Performance | 44.6% AIME | 52.5% AIME (+17% better) |
Coding Prowess | 1428 Codeforces | 1450 Codeforces (Top 1.5%) |
Nvidia’s dominance in AI has long relied on CUDA, their proprietary software platform that makes it easy to program their powerful GPUs for complex tasks. Think of CUDA as the “secret sauce” that makes Nvidia chips so attractive for AI development. However, US sanctions blocked Huawei and others from accessing advanced chips, including those from Nvidia. In response, Huawei developed its own Ascend AI chips, like the 910C, and, importantly, created CANN, their own software platform designed to compete with CUDA.

Early indications suggest DeepSeek’s R1 model may have been trained using Huawei’s Ascend chips. While the Ascend 910C might lag slightly behind Nvidia’s H100 in raw processing power based on floating point operations, developers are finding that with optimizations using the CANN software stack, they can achieve around 80% of the H100’s performance. If DeepSeek’s model was indeed trained on these chips, it signals a major breakthrough. It means China is rapidly closing the gap, proving it can achieve cutting-edge AI results without relying on Nvidia’s hardware or software ecosystem. This potential independence is precisely what has the US so worried.
Nvidia’s pain is China’s gain. The US thought they could choke the life out of China’s AI ambitions by banning advanced chip sales to the country. While Nvidia’s market value shrinks by nearly $600 billion, DeepSeek is proving the world that China won’t be held back. They’ll innovate, they’ll adapt, and they’ll thrive, regardless of the obstacles placed in their path.
And as for Nvidia, they’re learning the hard way that relying on the US government for protection is like taking swimming lessons from a drowning man.
The US government’s attempts to stifle China’s semiconductor industry are pathetic and transparent. While they’re busy issuing strongly worded letters and imposing sanctions, Huawei and SMIC are busy innovating. The patenting of SAQP technology is a direct challenge to the US’s dominance, and SMEE’s work on EUV lithography is a ticking time bomb under ASML’s monopoly. In fact, Huawei has already opened a massive R&D center in Shanghai, not for playing ping-pong, but to focus on developing their own lithography machinery. and when they succeed, ASML’s monopoly and the US’s control over the chip industry will crumble.
The US, a nation that built its empire on the back of bombs, bullets, and bloodshed.The US wanted a tech war. They got one. But this isn’t a battlefield they’re used to. This isn’t some proxy war where they can fund both sides, arming the world for conflict while lining their pockets. When the history of this decade is written, America’s epitaph will read: “They monetized arrogance while others engineered revolution.”