Reporting quarterly earnings Wednesday afternoon, it will be tough for Microsoft to avoid the issue of the AI breakthroughs from China's DeepSeek that are shaking up the tech world and the stock market this week.

Many technology executives will treat the earnings call as the first real opportunity to project confidence in the face of investor concerns about DeepSeek. Microsoft Chief Execut

Microsoft and its Big Tech cohort are investing tens of billions of dollars in the data centers and infrastructure needed to train and deploy AI software across their various services. But China’s DeepSeek upended the general thinking that developing AI models requires the use of the most powerful,

DeepSeek’s success initially rattled investors’ assumptions about the AI spending wave that has swept Silicon Valley in recent years.

The Chinese-language model has shocked and awed the American stock market. But my chat with it indicates there are many reasons to be skeptical. The release of Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s R1 model on January 20 triggered a surprise nuclear event in American tech markets this week.