New Delhi, Jan. 27 -- It's a year on from the "DeepSeek moment" that sparked a $1 trillion market panic.

The artificial-intelligence trade has proved resilient since then because a stream of more capable models continues to justify vast spending by U.S. companies. But Chinese AI models are threatening to capture more of the market in 2026, making it harder for U.S. leaders such as Alphabet's Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic to cash in.

In January 2025, investors misread DeepSeek's purported $5.6 million training cost as evidence that expensive Nvidia chips were becoming obsolete and that large U.S. technology companies had overinvested in AI. Instead, what followed was a demonstration of Jevons' Paradox: More capable and efficient models g...