Asian markets got an unpleasant return from the holidays as investors digested a week’s worth of bad news. Several Asian exchanges were closed for some, if not all, of the past week owing to the Lunar New Year holiday, making Monday the first chance that many investors could react to DeepSeek’s challenge to the tech sector and U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff moves on China, Mexico, and Canada.
As East Asia was enjoying the holiday, U.S. investors were frantically selling off shares in Big Tech in response to the sudden popularity of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup with a high-performing model trained on a much smaller amount of computing power.
