By Samuel Shen and Jiaxing Li SHANGHAI/HONGKONG (Reuters) -Chinese investors are rushing into AI-related stocks, betting the artificial intelligence advance of home-grown startup DeepSeek will lead to a boom in the sector and give the initiative to China in an intensifying Sino-U.

Asian shares Friday were mixed, with Chinese technology stocks rising as most other Asian equities declined. Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 dipped nearly 0.44% in early trading to

Tech stocks falling after small Chinese lab, DeepSeek, develops new AI model that challenges ChatGPT and Tesla; what to know.

Entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, known for co-writing Mosaic, one of the world’s first web browsers, wrote Sunday on X that “DeepSeek R1 is AI’s Sputnik moment,” likening it to the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the event that forced the U.S. to realize that its technological abilities were not unassailable.

A frenzy over an artificial intelligence chatbot made by Chinese tech startup DeepSeek was upending stock markets Monday and fueling debates over the economic and geopolitical competition between the U.

Some AI researchers hailed DeepSeek’s R1 as a breakthrough on the same level as DeepMind’s AlphaZero, a 2017 model that became superhuman at the board games Chess and Go by purely playing against itself and improving, rather than observing any human games.

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.

Robust gains by Chinese tech stocks have added billions of dollars in their market capitalization, driven by the sudden rise to fame by homegrown AI app DeepSeek.

Beijing’s growing clout in the artificial intelligence space has sparked a wave of optimism toward Chinese tech shares, with a gauge approaching a technical bull market and brokers issuing upbeat calls.

They are scooping up contracts that would pay out if stocks like Apple and Amazon race higher in the next few weeks.