Commentary: From DeepSeek to Huawei, US tech restrictions on China are backfiring
LONDON: “A wake-up call” for the United States.
That’s what US President Donald Trump said on Monday (Jan 27) about the emergence of Chinese AI app DeepSeek, a competitor to OpenAI and its ChatGPT tool.
The rise of the little-known Chinese tech startup has triggered alarm about the future of American dominance in artificial intelligence, erasing nearly US$600 billion from Nvidia’s market value in just one day.
It has also highlighted cracks in US efforts to curb China’s technological advancements. Instead of stalling progress, Washington’s containment strategy appears to be having the opposite effect of accelerating China’s drive toward self-reliance and innovation.
DeepSeek stands out for delivering a cost-effective AI solution, and by focusing on creating an efficient algorithm, the firm has demonstrated China’s ingenuity of finding workaround and that significant AI advancements are possible even under hardware constraints.
DeepSeek is not an isolated case of Chinese firms developing workarounds to navigate US export controls and sanctions.
When the US placed Huawei on its Entity List in 2019 — a move that barred the Chinese tech giant from accessing American technology without government approval — few could have predicted the outcome.
Written off by many after being cut off from advanced US technology, the company has emerged stronger and more vertically integrated. Huawei has built an entire semiconductor ecosystem encompassing everything from wafer fabrication to chip design. Its latest Mate 70 series smartphones, running on the completely indigenous Harmony OS NEXT operating system, represents a clean break from US technology dependencies.
This is not to say the path has been easy. Huawei's chips still lag