Washington [US], February 3: What is happening in the race to develop artificial intelligence (AI) technology between the US and China is raising many big questions.
Earlier this week, in just one day, America's leading technology companies lost $1 trillion in market value on the stock market. The cause was DeepSeek, a Chinese startup, which announced a generative AI model with development costs said to be dozens of times lower than its American competitors.
Question about cost
Speaking after DeepSeek announced its success, US President Donald Trump said the news about DeepSeek's model was "positive" due to its low cost, but at the same time he emphasized the need for American businesses to increase their competitiveness. "DeepSeek is a wake-up call for our businesses to focus on competing to win," Mr. Trump emphasized.
In an analysis sent to Thanh Nien about the push that DeepSeek created, Eurasia Group (USA), the world's leading political risk research and consulting unit , assessed: "China has tried to put a big "player" in the AI field on the map without, in theory, having access to leading chips from US companies like NVIDIA and AMD - at least those released in the past 2 years".
Meanwhile, according to some information that cannot be independently verified, DeepSeek actually uses some advanced hardware and chips from NVIDIA, but the constraints of the US embargo make it impossible for DeepSeek to admit. However, even if the above is a reality, the developments surrounding DeepSeek once again highlight the question of the effectiveness of the huge amounts of money that US technology corporations have invested in AI.
From an investment perspective, many US financial experts have warned that the AI industry is in a bubble, even becoming a "time bomb". The Washington Post quoted some investors as worrying that the huge amount of money being poured into AI by technology corporations, stock market investors and venture capital firms could lead to a financial bubble .
Regarding this issue, Goldman Sachs recently conducted a report that gathered the opinions of many relevant experts. In it, economist Daron Acemoglu, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, estimated that from 2024 to 2034, only 25% of tasks using AI will be automated to reduce costs, meaning that AI will only help improve no more than 5% of human work tasks. He predicted that in the next 10 years, AI will only help increase productivity by about 0.5% for the US and contribute to 0.9% of the country's GDP growth.
Challenges for America
The DeepSeek "shock" came less than a week after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison and US President Donald Trump announced the establishment of Stargate Company to develop infrastructure for the country. This plan was emphasized by Mr. Trump as "the largest AI infrastructure project in history".
Stargate was created to build infrastructure and data centers to train and run powerful AI models. Accordingly, the initial investment is 100 billion USD and the total investment plan will be up to 500 billion USD to help the US maintain its position as the world's number 1 AI.
According to a report by Eurasia Group citing analysis from Morgan Stanley Financial Group , Stargate's AI infrastructure systems are expected to require up to 15 GW of electricity. But the emergence of DeepSeek raises the question of whether data centers and technology infrastructure on the scale that Stargate aims to develop and deploy AI are really needed. Thereby, is the race to beat China to the top position in AI that President Trump is pursuing a waste of money? In fact, if the information published by DeepSeek about AI investment is accurate, "it could throw the entire premise of Stargate out the door and completely reset the AI market. The need to use data centers to develop AI could also decrease," according to Eurasia Group.
Meanwhile, billionaire Elon Musk, a close ally of President Trump, is also skeptical about the prospects of Stargate. Writing on the social network X, billionaire Musk said that the founders of Stargate "don't have the money" to follow through with the announced plan.
Source: Thanh Nien Newspaper
