DeepSeek, Huawei, Export Controls, and the Future of the U.S.-China AI Race

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# DeepSeek, Huawei, Export Controls, and the Future of the U.S.-China AI Race

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[Report](https://www.csis.org/taxonomy/term/3013)
by [Gregory C. Allen](https://www.csis.org/people/gregory-c-allen)

Published March 7, 2025

### Available Downloads

- [Download the Full Report 865kb](https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2025-03/250307_Allen_AI_Race.pdf?VersionId=8Qpp5OWwGj9OKB25qzQX4tQ_DzIZ9NS_)

#### **Introduction**

Six months ago, few in the West aside from obsessive AI professionals had heard of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI research lab founded barely more than a year and a half ago. Today, DeepSeek is a global sensation attracting the attention of heads of state, global CEOs, top investors, and the general public.

With the [release](https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1/commit/23807ced51627276434655dd9f27725354818974) of its R1 model on January 20, 2025—the same day as President Trump’s second inauguration—DeepSeek has cemented its [reputation](https://x.com/jackclarkSF/status/1861897444323098720) as the top frontier AI research lab in China and caused a reassessment of assumptions about the landscape of global AI competition. By January 27, DeepSeek’s iPhone app had overtaken OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the [most-downloaded](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/27/chinas-deepseek-ai-tops-chatgpt-app-store-what-you-should-know.html) free app on Apple’s U.S. App Store. The stock prices of some U.S. tech companies briefly tumbled, including the AI chip designer Nvidia, which lost more than [$600 billion](https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/why-nvidia-stock-plummeted-week) off its valuation in a single day. (AI chips are also known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, and the terms are used interchangeably in this report.)

ChatGPT has again overtaken DeepSeek in app store rankings, and Nvidia’s stock price has [since most

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