DeepSeek breakthrough raises AI energy questions [Video]

Having shattered assumptions in the tech sector and beyond about the cost of artificial intelligence, Chinese startup DeepSeek’s new chatbot is now roiling another industry: energy companies.

The firm says it developed its open-source R1 model using around 2,000 Nvidia chips, just a fraction of the computing power generally thought necessary to train similar programmes.

That has significant implications not only for the cost of developing AI, but also the energy for the data centres that are the beating heart of the growing industry.

The AI revolution has come with assumptions that computing and energy needs will grow exponentially, resulting in massive tech investments in both data centres and the means to power them, bolstering energy stocks.

Data centres house the high-performance servers and other hardware that make AI applications work.

So might DeepSeek represent a less power-hungry way to advance AI?

Investors seemed to think so, fleeing positions in …