Rivals are still digesting the implications of R1, which was built with less-powerful Nvidia chips but is competitive with those developed at the costs of hundreds of billions of dollars by U.S. tech giants. “The launch of DeepSeek’s R2 model could be a pivotal moment in the AI industry,” said Vijayasimha Alilughatta, chief operating officer of Indian tech services provider Zensar. Little is known about DeepSeek, whose founder Liang Wenfeng became a billionaire through his quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer.