Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) is riding high, but the AI chip race is heating up fast. Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates (Trades, Portfolio) praised CEO Jensen Huang's leadership, but he didn't sugarcoat the challenge ahead. Big Tech isn't sitting backAmazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has committed $8 billion to Anthropic's AI chip efforts, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) just dropped a supercomputer with its own AI chip, and Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) and Marvell (NASDAQ:MRVL) are rolling out advanced custom silicon. But the real wild card? DeepSeek, a Chinese AI firm that came out of nowhere with RI, a model delivering ChatGPT-level performance at a fraction of the cost. Investors betting on Nvidia's long-term AI dominance are now watching closely.

• Warning! GuruFocus has detected 3 Warning Signs with NVDA.

DeepSeek's rise is no fluke. Backed by hedge fund High-Flyer, it has amassed a GPU arsenal worth over $500 million, sidestepping export controls to get its hands on thousands of Nvidia's H100 and H800 chips. The company moves fastno bureaucracy, no red tapejust raw innovation. Its breakthroughs, like Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA), are slashing AI costs and shaking up the market. And DeepSeek isn't just catching upit's pushing AI efficiency so far that it's raising a bigger question: Do we even need as much compute power as before? If AI models can be trained and run with fewer GPUs, that's a direct threat to Nvidia's pricing power.

For now, Nvidia is still king, but cracks are forming. If AI becomes less about brute-force compute and more about efficiency, demand for Nvidia's high-end chips could soften. Throw in U.S.-China trade tensions, and the long-term picture gets even murkier. Investors should keep an eye on how Nvidia, Microsoft, and the rest of Big Tech respond because DeepSeek isn't just another AI startupit's a sign that the AI chip game is evolving fast.