The quick recovery from what could be serious scares shows that traders are an optimistic bunch–and it’s hopefully a good sign for the rally that is now into its third year.

DeepSeek released an open-source artificial intelligence model in December, saying it took only two months and less than $6 million to create it.

So much for the quiet pre-holiday trading session as Asian equities were mixed though Australia was closed for Australia Day, Indonesia was closed for Al Isra’ wal-Mi’raj, South Korea was closed for the Korean New Year,

DeepSeek stunned the tech world with the release of its R1 "reasoning" model, matching or exceeding OpenAI's reasoning model for a fraction of the cost.

Silicon Valley and Washington leaders said the app shows China can challenge the U.S. The Nasdaq lost 3 percent and chipmaker Nvidia shed $589 billion in market capitalization.

From Tencent to Baidu, major firms slash costs and streamline access as they integrate DeepSeek into cloud platforms and AI services.

Leading scientist Rao Yi argues that the significance of the tech’s challenge to US dominance lies in ‘how surprising it was to the world’.