Hello from sunny California. Is it just me or have the first two months of 2025 seemed both incredibly long but also to have passed by in the blink of an eye? The tech world has gone through so much upheaval in just a short few weeks, but if I had to summarise the year so far into two keywords, it would be: DeepSeek and Trump.

The Chinese AI developer DeepSeek kick-started worldwide debates around open-source AI and spending on AI infrastructure. The company’s low-cost model has been quickly adopted across China’s public and private sectors, and perhaps just as quickly been labelled a “national security risk” and shunned in the west.

While US tech companies might have to recalculate how much they should spend on AI and how much they will make from it because of DeepSeek, their CEOs don’t seem to hold any grudges against the start-up.