The developer of the chatbot that shocked U.S. incumbents had access to Nvidia chips that its parent company providentially acquired just before a 2022 U.S. export ban.

Government policies, generous funding and a pipeline of AI graduates have helped Chinese firms create advanced LLMs.

DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial-intelligence startup that’s just over a year old, has stirred awe and consternation in Silicon Valley after demonstrating AI models that offer comparable performance to the world’s best chatbots at seemingly a fraction of their development cost.