There is something poetically ironic about the news this weekend, that DeepSeek and Huawei have teamed up as China’s newest and oldest U.S. tech adversaries target home advantage. The most recent Chinese security threat to trigger much handwringing in Washington, with the OG that kicked off the whole U.S. versus China tech war in the first place.
Interestingly, that’s exactly how the South China Morning Post framed this latest news: “Tech war: Huawei cloud unit powers DeepSeek models in China’s bid for AI autonomy.” If you’re in America, this will not directly impact you. This is more about what happens in China. But as ever with the Chinese tech industry, it’s very interlaced and all these collaborations foster competitive advantage on foreign soil.
Which brings us to TikTok. While we still await news on which suitor will win the viral video prize, and the platform’s U.S. business changes hands to maintain its right to operate. Absent that, as things stand, and the ban kicks in (again) and those 170 million users lose access (again). Everything has changed though — whether politicians like it or not. DeepSeek has admitted many of the data accusations leveled at and denied byTikTok. Here your data really does end up in China. Period.
There are some parallels between TikTok and DeepSeek. Just as TikTok seems a new U.S. ownership structure, DeepSeek technology is being made (safely) available via Microsoft, Amazon and others. But the app has not been banned, despite the risks and it soaring to top the App Store and Play Store download charts. And clearly there is no onus on U.S. players behind the scenes to stop working with the platform, as Oracle and did with TikTok to comply with the ban.
The threat of a new (or re-enforced, to be exact) TikTok ban hands over the company and its users, and the current ban has prevented the app from being installed afresh or updated from either Apple’s or Google’s stores. But it’s hard to see how such a ban would figure now against this new backdrop, with serious DeepSeek-inspired AI warnings hanging in the air. The politics have changed, and I suspect (if tested) the legal case would present very differently as well.
The irony here should come across as stark. China cares about Huawei (its tech champion) and DeepSeek (its primary Silicon Valley disruptor) in a way it has never cared for ByteDance or TikTok. Per SCMP, “the move to launch DeepSeek’s models on a home-grown hardware backbone highlights China’s progress in cutting dependency on foreign technology and bolstering its domestic AI industry amid growing efforts by the U.S. to choke off China’s access to high-end chips that the U.S. government said could be used to advance military aims.”
Which brings us to the final final irony. All this is happening just as President Trump retakes office. The first time around was interesting on China tech. We’re barely a fortnight into the sequel, and it looks we haven’t seen anything yet.
