China's DeepSeek startup roiled artificial intelligence-driven stocks on Monday as Wall Street mulled huge investments by technology industry giants in AI infrastructure as well as demand for Nvidia chips.

It has been widely assumed that the United States was the leader in global artificial intelligence (AI) technology by far. Private AI companies, which include OpenAI and xAI, have raised tens of billions of dollars in the past year.

Barrett Woodside, co-founder of the San Francisco AI hardware company Positron, said he and his colleagues have been abuzz about DeepSeek.

The news is the latest sign of skyrocketing valuations for privately held AI start-ups, which show growing investor enthusiasm for AI and confidence that companies like Anthropic will justify that valuation over the long term, eventually generating billions in profits.