Ever since the Taiwanese AI company became a global pain, DeepSeek has dominated headlines in China—but the information has almost nothing to do with DeepSeek itself. Rather, companies across almost every industry are racing to proclaim that they have found a way to incorporate DeepSeek’s open resource models in their business strategy. Some have found true uses for the home, cheap Artificial model with cutting-edge capabilities, while others are simply doing it for the publicity boost or to virtue-signal their regional pride.
In recent weeks, over 20 Chinese automakers ( and at least one bus maker ) have said they are putting DeepSeek’s chatbot into their vehicles, according to local news reports. Some 30 medical and pharmaceutical firms said they are using DeepSeek in medical treatments and analysis, among other programs. Lots of banks, insurance companies, and trading firms across the country even disclosed they are using DeepSeek to teach customer service reps, style investment strategies, and manage similar kinds of tasks.
The whole frenzy resembles what happened in late 2022 when ChatGPT launched and a wave of American and European companies scrambled to find ways to signal to customers and investors they were engaging with what was then the most cutting-edge innovation in AI. Even though major Chinese AI companies like Baidu and Alibaba have released plenty of impressive AI models in the two years since then, they never managed to attract the same amount of attention as DeepSeek, which astonished the world by releasing an AI model that the startup claimed was built using far less computing resources than comparable models released by major companies.
On a Chinese online stock exchange platform where retail investors can ask questions to publicly traded companies, there have been nearly 5, 000 questions logged about DeepSeek as of March 11, the majority of which are asking specific firms whether they have considered or are currently using DeepSeek in their products. In response, hundreds of companies have confirmed they are incorporating the technology, a move that usually leads to a temporary increase in their stock price. But once investors realize that some companies are merely saying they are experimenting with DeepSeek’s app internally, their value plunges again.
Some of the DeepSeek announcements make perfect sense, like cloud computing companies saying they will provide DeepSeek-R1 to their customers and Chinese domestic AI chip makers optimizing their products to run DeepSeek’s models. But there are also plenty of firms that appear to be mostly clout-chasing, and it’s not totally clear how they will actually benefit from DeepSeek’s AI. For example, Cherry, a German computer accessory maker, released an” AI mouse” in China that you can raise to your mouth, push a button, and instantly have a voice conversation with DeepSeek’s chatbot.
Local governments in China are embracing DeepSeek, too. For example, Shenzhen officials have put DeepSeek-powered applications on the cloud” for all government agencies across the city”. Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, is using DeepSeek to analyze real-time urban management data as part of a smart city program. Thousands of government officials and employees across the country are also attending lectures given by professors or experts at state-owned companies that explain what DeepSeek is and how its technology can be used.
One reason DeepSeek has been so successful is that its open source model arrived at a time when Chinese companies were already looking for ways to transform their products with AI. Its tools are also affordable and easy to use. ” Chinese companies experimenting with deployment of AI models for business operations were primed for the release of such a capable open source/weight model, which dramatically lowers costs for deployment”, Paul Triolo, the China practice and technology policy lead at consultancy DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, wrote in a blog post.
For example, as competition between electric vehicle manufacturers in China has intensified over the past few years, automakers were forced to continually develop new smart features capable of dazzling customers, a task that is well suited for DeepSeek’s models. DeepSeek offers” a better and faster interactive experience” while “requiring lower compute costs, which means lower hardware cost”, says Lei Xing, an auto analyst focused on the Chinese market and the former editor of China Auto Review. The technology allows EV companies to do things like quickly build advanced smart assistants without paying for the up-front investment in research and development usually required.
But also, “it’s just cool from a marketing perspective to have integration of one of the most disruptive AI tools and leading LLMs currently available in the world”, Xing says.
Many Chinese companies are” just riding the attention wave”, says Liqian Ren, a quantitative investment specialist at WisdomTree, an investment firm. The Chinese equity market is still heavily driven by public sentiment rather than actual business performance, she says, and investors often shift wildly from being very positive to very negative. Adopting DeepSeek’s models is an easy way for companies to generate media buzz and drum up investor interest.
But there’s also another factor that has helped make DeepSeek particularly trendy in China: the fact that the West freaked out about it. ” Its strong reception overseas has further boosted its popularity in China, serving as the firm’s best marketing campaign”, says Angela Huyue Zhang, a law professor who studies Chinese technology policy at the University of Southern California.
” Where there is blockade, there is breakthrough, where there is suppression, there is innovation”, Wang Yi, China’s minister of foreign affairs, said in a speech on March 7 in which he also compared DeepSeek to China’s previous technological breakthroughs in areas like nuclear weapons development and space exploration.
Ren says the international reaction to DeepSeek, which was stronger initially than the domestic reaction in China, helped the company become a symbol of the promise of China’s AI industry in the age of geopolitical tensions with the United States. ” People realized China can catch up in light of the chip sanctions, so that is a confidence booster for many Chinese people. And this is why I think the models by Alibaba, ByteDance, or Baidu did not have as much impact as DeepSeek”, Ren says.
