On his first full day back in power, Donald Trump trumpeted a 500-billion dollar plan to build giant data centers for artificial intelligence. The photo op put the rest of the world on notice: the billionaire tech bros of Silicon Valley reign supreme with the full weight of the White House behind them. Fast forward to Monday and the record 590-billion dollar drop in the market value of US chip maker Nvidia. Spooking the markets, the announcement that a Chinese start-up can operate its latest AI model 18 times cheaper than Sam Altman’s Chat-GPT-4.  Is DeepSeek for real? Why the sudden surprise? If it upends America’s dominance of artificial intelligence, does that mean a democratization of global information systems or a showdown between superpowers that ultimately decides who rules the world?