Rene Haas was on an exercise bike two weeks ago watching CNBC like he does every morning, when the tech sector took a beating. The TV screen had “red everywhere”, recalls the chief executive of Arm Holdings. “Everything is crashing and I’m thinking to myself: seriously? Really? What are people thinking?”
The market freak-out had been triggered by the release of a new model from DeepSeek, a Chinese-owned artificial intelligence start-up that has developed a large language model capable of results comparable to those of OpenAI’s ChatGPT — for what it claimed was a fraction of their cost. As investors took fright that day, Nvidia, the dominant maker of chips that power AI applications, lost almost $600bn of market value. Shares in Arm, which Haas has run since 2022, fell about 10 per cent, equivalent to losing about $17bn (they have since recovered).
Arm designs and licenses the essential architecture in almost all smartphones and increasingly works with chipmakers such as Nvidia, so is likely to be affected by any anxiety about AI’s trajectory. Does Haas agree with the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who hailed DeepSeek as AI’s “Sputnik moment”? “No,” he says firmly. “This is moving so fast, by the time you write this article, there could be something different.”