The Anatomy of a Bubble Bursting

By Ben Berkowitz for Axios

When lots of people are worried about bubble valuations in stocks or a specific sector, all it takes is a small poke to make the whole thing wobble precariously.

Why it matters: That can cost investors $1 trillion or more in a single day, as happened Monday with the global AI rout.

It can also challenge the fundamental assumptions behind an entire economy, like the nascent Trump administration's push to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in American AI supremacy.

Zoom out: In the 1950s, the Soviets beat the U.S. into space. In 2025, China appears to have potentially beaten the U.S. to building a better AI mousetrap.

Last week, the small Chinese upstart DeepSeek announced a new reasoning model, R1, that appears to outperform the best America has to offer, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Meta's Llama.

The problem? Those companies spent billions of dollars building their models, fueling growth for companies like Nvidia, whose chips are the gold standard in that training process.

DeepSeek spent a mere $6 million, figured out how to do it faster and more efficiently with cheaper hardware, and then released the whole thing as a free, open-source platform.

The big picture: President Trump's economic vision relies on massive growth, fueled by the AI boom that his closest advisers have sold as the country's future.

The biggest economic announcement of his first week in office was Stargate, a five-year plan to spend $500 billion on AI infrastructure. (Complicating matters, Trump ally Elon Musk immediately cast doubt on whether anyone actually had the money to fund the project.)
But if China can do AI better and faster at one one-thousandth of the cost, it casts a shadow on the rationale for spending that kind of money and leaves the country playing catch-up.

Combined CapEx for Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon

Data: Company filings, announcements; Note: Alphabet and Amazon estimates based on research reports; Chart: Axios Visuals

Follow the money: The U.S. stock market, though incredibly strong in recent years, is also fragile.

Market concentration — that is to say, a small number of stocks driving the overall market's performance — is higher now than it's been in decades. In such an environment, it take very little to make the whole thing go south.
Investors got a little taste of that earlier this month, when Nvidia's CEO made an off-hand comment about quantum computers, and a red-hot sector lost roughly half its value in one day.

Between the lines: In those volatile scenarios, what goes down violently can also rally just as spectacularly.

One terrible day in markets could be the start of a horrible year, or it could simply be the market shaking out a little over-exuberance and reverting to slightly more rational valuations.

"We will soon find out if all the claims [about DeepSeek] are true and it is my expectation that we will also learn how quickly U.S. firms can adapt," Nancy Tengler, CEO of Laffer Tengler Investments, said in a note Monday.

The intrigue: Generative AI, as a technology and an industry, has developed so quickly that there hasn't been much time for long-term thinking.

If AI really is that powerful, and if the Chinese really have found a way to build it faster and cheaper, any company that's capable of leveraging the technology could win in the long term with more accessible growth opportunities.
"While there is a contention that DeepSeek's efficient training methods could reduce the demand for high-end Nvidia GPUs, potentially affecting sales, it is also plausible that the more cost-effective approach will result in more demand for hardware for those looking to train proprietary models," Mark Klein, CEO of investment fund SuRo Capital, said in a note Monday.

The bottom line: One bad day in the markets isn't the end of the world.

But it's also a wake-up call. In a 24-hour, highly interconnected world, never doubt that competition is right around the corner.

Full article posted here. Axios' Felix Salmon contributed. Header Illustration: Eniola Odetunde/Axios Data: Company filings, announcements; Note: Alphabet and Amazon estimates based on research reports; Chart: Axios Visuals.

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