DeepSeek and Alibaba don't have access to Nvidia's strongest chips. They switched to Chinese chips and gave their models away for free - the sanction produced exactly the opposite of what it was meant to.
Forget America for a moment. There's a whole wing of the AI world growing in parallel that almost nobody notices - the Chinese one. DeepSeek came out of nowhere and shook everyone up. Alibaba has its own family of models, Qwen, currently one of the most downloaded in the world. Neither of them is a minor player. They're just playing by different rules, because they had to.
Here's why. The US banned Nvidia from selling its most powerful chips to China - the ones the strongest models get trained on. The logic is military: stop the supply of the tool, stop the progress. It's like refusing to let someone buy the best equipment because you're afraid of what they'll build with it.
The Chinese companies responded with two things. First, they redirected their models to run on their own chips, made by Huawei, instead of the banned Nvidia. Second, and more importantly, they released their models free and open. That means any programmer, startup or curious person anywhere in the world can download a whole ready-made AI model onto their computer, without paying a subscription, without asking permission, without going through an American company.
For you, this means the following: if you see a translation app, a writing tool, or coding help that's free and works surprisingly well, there's a real chance Qwen or DeepSeek is sitting underneath, not GPT or Claude. Small teams all over the world are already building products on top of these models exactly because they don't want to pay monthly rent for access to someone else's AI.
In practice
The sanction was meant as a brake. In practice it became an accelerator - just not for military power, for influence. Ban someone from buying the best tool, and they don't stop. They build a cheaper one and, here's the twist, give it away to everyone around them. Now half the world is learning to build AI products on Chinese software, for free, while Western companies keep selling access drop by drop.
This isn't a story of good guys and bad guys. The embargo did its job - Chinese companies really are behind on chips. But while we were all watching the ceiling the ban fell from, nobody was watching the floor, where DeepSeek and Alibaba quietly spread their models everywhere. A sanction takes one thing from you. Sometimes it gives you a reason to build something else, one that spreads faster than the thing that was banned.