Year in Review: DeepSeek’s Breakout Rewrites U.S.-China AI Race

[para. 1] In 2025, artificial intelligence (AI) became the central technological force influencing global life, work, and competition, especially between China and the United States. While both countries lead the current AI revolution, their relationship has shifted from cooperation to intense competition, rather than both benefiting from globalization as before.

[para. 3][para. 4][para. 5][para. 6][para. 7][para. 8] This shift was particularly evident during China’s Spring Festival, when DeepSeek, an AI large-model company backed by High-Flyer Quant (a major quantitative hedge fund in China), emerged as a significant new challenger. High-Flyer Quant was one of only six Chinese firms with access to over 10,000 GPUs—crucial for AI model training, and unique as a non-internet-sector player. Over the holiday, DeepSeek’s chatbot app achieved a viral download spike exceeding 2,000%, topping global app-store rankings. More importantly, DeepSeek’s V3 and R1 models matched the performance of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and o1, unsettling both domestic and foreign competitors. DeepSeek’s innovative approach centered on algorithmic optimizations, greatly increasing Nvidia GPU efficiency and lowering training/cost barriers. Notably, these advanced models were released as open source, offering performance parity, zero pricing, and an open ecosystem. This gave Chinese tech companies a clear example of potential innovation despite hardware constraints.

[para. 9][para. 10][para. 11][para. 12] China’s major tech firms—including Tencent and Alibaba—rapidly integrated DeepSeek’s models into their cloud services and quickened their model development pace, with broader IT sectors moving to ensure compatibility with large AI models. This contributed to China’s renewed acceleration in closing the AI gap with the U.S. Government support followed: in August, China’s State Council set explicit AI integration targets, aiming for over 70% adoption rate in six key sectors by 2027 and over 90% by 2030, with a fully mature intelligent economy expected by 2035. The 15th Five-Year Plan draft from late October emphasized technological self-reliance and talent/data initiatives.

[para. 13][para. 14][para. 15][para. 16][para. 17][para. 18][para. 19] The global chip war was a key backdrop. DeepSeek’s rise offered a blueprint for circumventing U.S. restrictions on advanced AI hardware. In January 2025, the U.S. enacted a final rule restricting semiconductor exports to China and beyond, with further tightening under the Trump administration using equity-based restrictions. U.S. officials and tech leaders warned of damage to U.S. interests; Nvidia’s China market share dropped from 95% to near zero. Temporary relaxations on Nvidia’s H20 and H200 chips involved revenue-sharing (15% and 25%, respectively), aiming to protect Nvidia’s training market dominance while limiting China’s access to leading-edge chips. Nevertheless, heightened U.S. oversight eliminated meaningful recovery for Nvidia in China.

[para. 20][para. 21][para. 22][para. 23][para. 24][para. 25] China responded with a decisive shift to domestic chip alternatives. Companies like Cambricon, Huawei, Baidu Kunlun, Alibaba’s T-Head, Moore Threads, and MetaX quickly scaled production, winning orders from leading telecom and cloud firms. Cambricon temporarily became the country’s most valuable A-share company, topping 660 billion yuan ($94.3 billion) after a 500% stock jump. Moore Threads and MetaX saw major IPOs, with peak “hard tech” IPOs forecast for 2026.

[para. 26][para. 27][para. 28][para. 29][para. 30][para. 31][para. 32][para. 33][para. 34][para. 35] The U.S.-China AI competition is now systemic, covering talent, compute, and commercialization. In the U.S., the “Magnificent Seven” tech firms drove stock markets higher and fueled an AI boom; the Nasdaq soared to 24,000 by October 2025. Intense talent competition led to massive salaries as well as over 500,000 tech layoffs between 2023 and 2025, prompting debates over jobless growth. China, constrained by capital but buoyed by vast engineering resources, saw investment shift from general AI models to industry-specific applications. ByteDance’s Doubao surpassed DeepSeek as China’s top AI app, while others pivoted to chatbots or hardware integration. Broader industry shifts saw humanoid robots (Asia houses 73%, with 56% in China) and AI glasses boom, with global smart-glasses shipments up 42.5% in 2025 and AI glasses up more than 200%. AI deepened impacts in energy, finance, education, and law, raising employment and ethical questions. Overall, 2025 didn’t witness one singular breakthrough but exposed how societies adapt as AI nears human-level capability, leaving the ultimate direction of U.S.-China rivalry unresolved.