India, Feb. 9 -- President Donald Trump had just announced Stargate, a $500 billion AI venture to keep US dominance in AI going when DeepSeek hit the world like wildfire. The startup from Hangzhou, a city in eastern China, comprising recent graduates from Chinese universities, had launched R1, its AI model that was much cheaper, used less computing power and performed better than AI models coming from the Silicon Valley billion-dollar companies in some parameters.

On Castro Street, in downtown Mountain View, which is the headquarters of Google, everyone from screen-dazed techies in coffee shops to food app delivery groups milling outside restaurants furiously discussed the new free app, which became the most downloaded free app in the Un...