Elon Musk has questioned the microchip claims made by DeepSeek AI, a fast-emerging player in the artificial intelligence pool, which is starting to challenge the United States’ control over the AI industry.
Newsweek has reached out to DeepSeek via email and Musk via X’s press department for comment.
Why It Matters
DeepSeek AI could alter the AI market and provide a boost to China in the AI race. The open-source AI chatbot has gained traction in China and captured the attention of global markets, including the U.S.
What To Know
The AI assistant is powered by DeepSeeks’ open-source models, which the company has said can be trained at a fraction of the cost using far fewer chips than the world’s leading models.
Deepseek says it only needed 2,000 specialized chips from Nvidia to train its V3. This is in comparison to a reported 16,000 or more required to train leading models, according to The New York Times.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attend the inauguration of Donald Trump in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC
Musk has questioned these claims in response to posts about DeepSeek AI on X, formerly Twitter.
In one of the posts, Musk responded to a clip of Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, who said that DeepSeek has around 50,000 NVIDIA H100s that they cannot talk about due to U.S. export controls.
Musk wrote in response: “Obviously.”
Musk also replied to a post from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who had written: “Deepseek is now #1 on the AppStore, surpassing ChatGPT—no NVIDIA supercomputers or $100M needed. The real treasure of AI isn’t the UI or the model—they’ve become commodities. The true value lies in data and metadata, the oxygen fueling AI’s potential. The future’s fortune? It’s in our data. Deepgold.”
To this, Musk responded, “Lmao no.”
In another post, Musk dubbed the AI platform “DeeperSeeker.”
The advances and claims made by DeepSeek have raised questions about the computing power needed to develop AI systems.
DeepSeek’s AI Assistant, which is powered by DeepSeek-V3, has now overtaken the rival tool ChatGPT and become the top-rated free application available on the Apple App Store in the United States.
What People Are Saying
The AI Colony, which posts content about AI, on X: “It’s only been few days since China Deepseek R1 dropped & it’s INSANE! SPOILER: ChatGPT is now behind.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in a 2024 op-ed for The Washington Post: “We face a strategic choice about what kind of world we are going to live in: Will it be one in which the United States and allied nations advance a global AI that spreads the technology’s benefits and opens access to it, or an authoritarian one, in which nations or movements that don’t share our values use AI to cement and expand their power?”
What Happens Next
DeepSeek’s rise in popularity is expected to elicit a response from industry leaders and the White House, which has taken a more involved and proactive approach to AI under the new administration.
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