If necessity is the mother of invention, then the United States' biggest artificial intelligence investors are rethinking where they put a bulk of their combined $131.5 billion last year in the wake of the debut of China's open-source AI model, DeepSeek.

A small lab in China has shaken Silicon Valley. The sudden appearance of an advanced AI assistant from DeepSeek, a previously little-known company in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, has sparked discussion and debate within the U.

The company built a cheaper, competitive chatbot with fewer high-end computer chips than U.S. behemoths like Google and OpenAI, showing the limits of chip export control.