On the surface, the ASX defied Wall Street’s day of drama. But local investors spent the day puzzling over what DeepSeek means for the Australian tech sector.
For the past few years, as Australian sharemarket returns lagged those of the United States, some investors have criticised the bourse for still being overly reliant on banking and bulk commodities.
On Tuesday, after Wall Street was rocked by the emergence of Chinese artificial intelligence upstart DeepSeek and a $1 trillion fall in the value of market darling Nvidia, it was our big banks and miners that shielded investors from a feared sell-off, with the ASX 200 remaining in the green for most of the day.
But don’t be fooled. While small gains in the share prices of Commonwealth Bank, Westpac and National Australia Bank soothed concerns about a DeepSeek crisis, local investors spent the day trying to work through the ramifications of the Chinese start-up’s promise to lower AI development costs and speed up development times.
Source: https://www.afr.com/chanticleer/how-the-asx-dodged-the-deepseek-bullet-20250128-p5l7sj