The Commerce Department has launched a probe into whether Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek obtained restricted Nvidia chips through Singapore, reports say.

DeepSeek’s AI models reportedly rival OpenAI’s for a fraction of the cost and compute.

Export controls need to be tightened after revelations the Chinese company used Nvidia technology, the leaders of a congressional committee said.

Two members of U.S. Congress are calling on President Donald Trump's administration to consider restricting the export of artificial intelligence chips made by Nvidia , alleging Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has relied on them.

American AI stocks got sucker punched after China's DeepSeek app reportedly showed advancements against rivals sending investors into sell mode, shaving 3% off the Nasdaq.

DeepSeek stunned the tech world with the release of its R1 "reasoning" model, matching or exceeding OpenAI's reasoning model for a fraction of the cost.

DeepSeek claims it costs them less than $6 million to train its latest AI models, while it costs ChatGPT $100 million. DeepSeek is able to charge only $0.14 per 1 million input tokens, compared to $15 at OpenAI. Token input pricing has to do with the amount of text that goes into training the AI language models.