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

DeepSeek R1 is a large-language model that is seen as rival to ChatGPT and Meta while using a fraction of their budgets.

China's DeepSeek is roiling AI stocks as Wall Street mulls demand for Nvidia chips and huge capital spending by tech industry giants.

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.