At the end of his internship at Nvidia in 2023, Zizheng Pan, a young artificial-intelligence researcher from China, faced a pivotal decision: stay in Silicon Valley with the world’s leading chip designers or return home to join DeepSeek, then a little-known startup in eastern China. Pan chose DeepSeek without much hesitation, Zhiding Yu, a senior research scientist at Nvidia and Pan’s mentor during the internship, recalled on X last month. “I am still very much impressed,” Yu wrote, adding that ...