At a press conference on March 3, Singapore's minister of foreign affairs and justice admitted that US-made Nvidia chips had passed through his country before being sent to Malaysia, which was not necessarily their "final destination." The elephant in the room was China, which, in 2024, overtook Singapore as the second-largest global market for Nvidia. According to the financial site The Kobeissi Letter, Nvidia's sales in Singapore have increased by 740% since DeepSeek's creation in July 2023.
On January 30, Washington launched an investigation to determine whether China had illegally obtained Nvidia chips through third-party countries, thereby circumventing the US embargo. The myth of a streamlined, low-cost Chinese artificial intelligence (AI), embodied by DeepSeek, celebrated by Western media, and glorified by Beijing, could collapse as quickly as it appeared.
To win the AI race, Beijing has deployed the same strategy it used to grow its national champions, such as Alibaba and Tencent, encouraging them to expand into the global market while excluding foreign competitors from China.
Western media rushed to heap praise on the "Chinese ChatGPT," citing figures provided by the company – a budget of $5.5 million (€5 million) – without being able to verify them. Analysts lauded the meteoric rise of this unexpected newcomer in the download rankings, overlooking the fact that 1.4 billion Chinese citizens are barred from downloading any foreign alternatives, including ChatGPT, Llama, Gemini or the French-developed Mistral.
Right on cue
Ordinarily condemned as peddlers of anti-China falsehoods, Western media have suddenly found favor in the eyes of the totalitarian regime, which now cites them as reliable sources to crown DeepSeek as a "revolutionary AI." What is presented as a technological war actually began as a battle of narratives that Beijing won without firing a shot.
And the timing of DeepSeek's debut was no accident. It coincided with the approach of the Lunar New Year on January 29, which also marked the end of the Made in China 2025 plan, a key initiative for Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). While most of the plan's targets – robotics, electric vehicles and drones – have been met, the AI sector remains unquestionably dominated by the United States.
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