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World’s richest people lose $108B after DeepSeek sell-off

A person shows US dollars at a currency exchange stall in Manila, Philippines, Oct. 21, 2022. — REUTERS

THE world’s 500 richest people, led by Nvidia Corp. co-founder Jensen Huang, lost a combined $108 billion on Monday as a tech-led sell-off tied to Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) developer DeepSeek sent major indices plunging.

Billionaires whose fortunes are linked to artificial intelligence were the biggest losers: Huang saw his fortune fall $20.1 billion, a 20% drop, while Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison’s $22.6 billion loss was larger in absolute terms, but represented just 12% of his fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Dell, Inc.’s Michael Dell lost $13 billion, and Binance Holdings Ltd. co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao shaved $12.1 billion.

Tech-sector titans as a group saw $94 billion of wealth evaporate — roughly 85% of the Bloomberg index’s total decline. The Nasdaq Composite Index fell 3.1%, and the S&P 500 dropped 1.5%.

Hangzhou-based DeepSeek has been developing AI models since 2023, but the company first came onto the radar of many Western investors this weekend as its free DeepSeek R1 chatbot app topped download charts worldwide. So many new users piled in that DeepSeek struggled to keep the app online, suffering outages and forcing it to restrict sign-ups to users with Chinese phone numbers.

DeepSeek’s dark-horse entry into the AI race, which it says cost just $5.6 million to develop, is a challenge to Silicon Valley’s narrative that massive capital spending is essential to developing the strongest models. That delivered a serious blow to billionaires whose fortunes are tied to the Western AI supply chain that’s been the equities market’s biggest driver over the past two years.

Soaring valuations for so-called AI hyperscalers — including Meta Platforms, Inc., Alphabet,   Inc. and Microsoft Corp. — have generated billions in wealth for their owners since OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT in November 2022. These companies have for the most part operated on a similar playbook: Spend huge sums to develop and run AI systems by hoarding top-of-the-line semiconductors and the energy supplies needed to run them.

Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that the company planned to spend $60 billion to $65 billion on projects related to AI this year, well above Wall Street estimates. Capital spending across all Big Tech firms is on pace to reach $200 billion in 2025, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence report.

Despite limited revenue to show for all their investment so far, markets have rewarded US tech stocks with record-high valuations, which have in turn generated historic wealth gains for their owners. Nvidia has stood out as the AI boom’s biggest single winner so far, with Huang’s net worth increasing almost eight-fold to $121 billion since the start of 2023 through Friday. Mr. Zuckerberg’s fortune soared 385% to $229 billion over the same period and Amazon.com, Inc.’s Jeff Bezos gained 133% to $254 billion.

While Huang and Ellison suffered losses, other major tech billionaires’ fortunes escaped unscathed. Mr. Zuckerberg’s net worth ended the day up, gaining $4.3 billion as Meta rebounded from an early-session decline. Mr. Bezos’ wealth climbed by about $632 million.

CAPITAL SPENDING
The fact that DeepSeek was able to develop a free model that potentially rivals or beats competitors including ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude at a fraction of the development cost led investors to question the logic behind Silicon Valley’s dependence on capital spending.

A key reason why DeepSeek didn’t rely on big investment and top-of-the-line chips to develop its model is that Chinese firms have had limited access to the powerful GPUs, or graphics processing units, most Western companies rely on ever since the US government instituted strict export controls on the most advanced chips.

In an interview with CNBC last week, Alexandr Wang, CEO of training data provider Scale AI, said that despite the export controls, DeepSeek and other Chinese developers likely have more GPUs than Silicon Valley is aware of.

“The Chinese labs have more H100s than people think,” Mr. Wang said, referring to Nvidia’s top-of-the-line AI chip. “My understanding is that DeepSeek has about 50,000 H100s, which they can’t talk about, obviously, because it’s against the export controls that the US has in place.” — Bloomberg

Auschwitz survivors warn of dangers of rising antisemitism at anniversary of camp’s liberation

A GENERAL VIEW of the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate at Auschwitz, on the day of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on Jan. 27, 2025. — VICTORIA JONES/POOL VIA REUTERS

OSWIECIM, Poland — Auschwitz survivors warned of the dangers of rising antisemitism on Monday, as they marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German death camp by Soviet troops in one of the last such gatherings of those who experienced its horrors.

The ceremony at the site of the camp, which Nazi Germany set up in occupied Poland during World War II to murder European Jews on a huge scale, was attended by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Britain’s King Charles, French President Emmanuel Macron, Polish President Andrzej Duda and many other leaders.

They did not make speeches, but rather listened for perhaps the last time to those who suffered and witnessed at first hand one of humanity’s greatest atrocities.

Israel, founded for Jews in the shadow of the Holocaust, sent Education Minister Yoav Kisch.

“We see in the modern world today a great increase in antisemitism, and it was antisemitism that led to the Holocaust,” said Marian Turski, 98, who was sent to Auschwitz in 1944 and survived the westward ‘death march’ to Buchenwald in 1945.

“Let’s not be afraid to convince ourselves that we can solve problems between neighbors.”

Retired physician Leon Weintraub, 99, who was separated from his family and sent to Auschwitz in 1944, warned of the dangers of intolerance.

“I ask you to multiply your efforts to counteract the views whose effects we are commemorating today,” he said.

Author and academic Tova Friedman, 86, said “80 years after the liberation, the world is again in crisis.”

“Our Jewish-Christian values have been overshadowed worldwide by prejudice, fear, suspicion and extremism,” she said, “and the rampant antisemitism that is spreading among the nations is shocking.”

Antisemitic incidents have surged in part along with protests against Israel in many parts of Europe, North America and Australia since Israel launched its assault on the Palestinian enclave of Gaza after attacks on Israel by Hamas militants on Oct. 7, 2023.

Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, said on Monday that hatred of Jews was rising against the backdrop of that war, adding: “Young people are getting most of their information from social media, and that is dangerous.”

Before the ceremony, which took place in a tent built over the gate to the former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, leaders stressed how important it was to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.

“The act of remembering the evils of the past remains a vital task, and in so doing we inform our present and shape our future,” King Charles said during a visit to the Jewish Community Center in Krakow.

President Duda told reporters at the camp that “we Poles, on whose land the Germans built this concentration camp, are today the guardians of memory.”

That remembrance of crimes committed in the name of Nazi notions of racial superiority has itself become an acutely political issue in recent years with the rise of far-right parties across Europe.

‘HISTORICAL GUILT’
On Saturday, billionaire Elon Musk, high-profile adviser to US President Donald Trump, made a video address to supporters of Germany’s AfD (Alternative fuer Deutschland), which is running second in polls for the Feb. 23 election on a platform that includes playing down historical guilt for the Holocaust.

“Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great grandparents,” said Mr. Musk, who himself laid a wreath at Auschwitz a year ago.

The rally prompted Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to say that “the words we heard from the main actors of the AfD rally about ‘Great Germany’ and ‘the need to forget German guilt for Nazi crimes’ sounded all too familiar and ominous.”

More than 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, perished in gas chambers or from starvation, cold and disease at Auschwitz, where most had been brought in freight wagons, packed like livestock.

More than three million of Poland’s 3.2 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis.

In all, between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, along with gypsies, sexual minorities, disabled people and others who offended Nazi ideas of racial superiority. — Reuters

Google Maps to rename ‘Gulf of Mexico’ to ‘Gulf of America’ for US users

REUTERS

WASHINGTON — Google Maps will change the name of “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America” once it is officially updated in the U.S. Geographic Names System, Google said in an X post on Monday.

The change will be visible in the U.S., but the name will remain “Gulf of Mexico” in Mexico. Outside of the two countries, users will see both names on Google Maps.

The Trump administration’s Interior Department said on Friday it had officially changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and the Alaskan peak Denali, the tallest mountain in North America, to Mount McKinley.

Google Maps, which is owned by Alphabet’s Google, will make a similar change with Mount McKinley.

President Donald Trump ordered the name changes as part of a flurry of executive actions hours after taking office on Jan. 20, making good on a campaign promise.

“As directed by the President, the Gulf of Mexico will now officially be known as the Gulf of America and North America’s highest peak will once again bear the name Mount McKinley,” the Interior Department said in a statement last week.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum earlier this month jokingly suggested North America, including the United States, be renamed “Mexican America” — a historic name used on an early map of the region.

Reached for comment, a Google spokesperson referred Reuters to the company’s X post.

Google has applied the same locale-based labeling conventions to other locations subject to naming disputes.

Outside of Japan and South Korea, the body of water bordering both nations is listed as the “Sea of Japan (East Sea).”

In 2012, Iran threatened to take legal action against Google over its decision to drop the term “Persian Gulf” from its Google Maps and leaving the waterway between Iran and the Arabian peninsula nameless. The body of water is now labeled “Persian Gulf (Arabian Gulf)” in other countries. — Reuters

[B-SIDE Podcast] Closer look at childhood cancer care in the Philippines

Follow us on Spotify BusinessWorld B-Side

Cancer affects over 5,000 children in the Philippines annually. Although highly treatable, late diagnoses and other factors contribute to the country’s low survival rate of just 30%.

In this B-Side episode, we speak with Dr. Ana Patricia A. Alcasabas, head of Pediatric Hematology-Oncology at the Philippine General Hospital (PGH) and chair of the National Sub-Technical Working Group for Childhood Cancer, as she discusses the country’s challenges in fighting childhood cancer.

She also talks about childhood cancer care at PGH and how the institution leads initiatives to improve care in the country.

Interview by Edg Adrian A. Eva
Audio editing by Jayson Mariñas

Follow us on Spotify BusinessWorld B-Side

Philippines’ sovereign wealth fund interested in Chinese stake in grid operator

MANILA – The Philippines’ sovereign wealth fund would be interested in the stake held by China’s State Grid Corp in the operator of the country’s power grid, its president said on Tuesday.

Maharlika Investment Corp president and chief executive officer Rafael Consing Jr told a press conference the wealth fund, which on Monday announced it was buying into the National Grid Corp of the Philippines, has not spoken to the Chinese firm but said it would be interested in the stake if it becomes available.

China’s State Grid Corp holds a 40% stake in NGCP, which holds a 25-year concession to run the country’s sole power transmission operator since winning the contract in 2007. — Reuters

Trump says Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok

MAY GAUTHIER-UNSPLASH

U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters on Monday that Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok and that he would like to see a bidding war over the app.

Microsoft and TikTok did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for a comment outside regular business hours.

Mr. Trump has previously said that he was in discussions with several parties about purchasing TikTok and expects to make a decision on the app’s future within the next 30 days.

The app, which has about 170 million American users, was briefly taken offline just before a law requiring ByteDance to either sell it on national security grounds or face a ban took effect on Jan. 19.

Mr. Trump, after taking office on Jan. 20, signed an executive order seeking to delay by 75 days the enforcement of the law that was put in place after U.S. officials warned that there was a risk of Americans’ data being misused under ByteDance. – Reuters

US court throws out Biden-era rules designed to protect car buyers

WESLEY TINGEY-UNSPLASH

WASHINGTON – A U.S. appeals court on Monday threw out consumer protection rules adopted by the Biden administration to ban bait-and-switch tactics and prohibit auto dealers charging for add-on costs that do not benefit new car buyers.

In response to legal challenges brought by the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) and a Texas dealer group, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals said in a 2-1 decision that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had violated procedural rules in writing the regulation without giving advance notice of the planned regulation.

The rule required up-front pricing in dealers’ advertising and sales discussions and informed consent from consumers before charging for any item. It was proposed in 2022 and finalized in January 2024 but put on hold pending the legal challenge.

The FTC had said the new rules would bar junk fees like a service contract for an oil change for an electric vehicle or a duplicative warranty and estimated it would save consumers more than $3.4 billion and 72 million hours annually shopping for vehicles.

NADA President Mike Stanton called the decision a “victory for the rule of law and a great outcome for consumers.”

He added the rule “would have added massive amounts of time, complexity, paperwork and cost to the car-buying and car-shopping experience for virtually every customer.”

The FTC has brought complaints against a number of auto dealers. It won a $20 million settlement in December from a group of 10 car dealerships that it accused of systematically defrauding consumers looking to buy vehicles.

Judge Stephen Higginson dissented from the ruling, saying Congress in 2010 gave the FTC authority to issue regulations that would require “price transparency and rules against deception, which would spur billions of dollars in economic benefit for U.S. consumers.”

He said the rule came “after a decade of roundtables, comments, and over 100,000 consumer complaints, many leading to federal and state law enforcement actions against unfair and deceptive motor vehicle dealer practices.” – Reuters

India and China agree to resume air travel after nearly five years

STOCK PHOTO | Image from Pixabay

BEIJING/NEW DELHI – India and China have agreed to resume direct air services after nearly five years, India’s foreign ministry said on Monday, signalling a thaw in relations between the neighbours after a deadly 2020 military clash on their disputed Himalayan border.

Both sides will negotiate a framework on the flights in a meeting that will be held at an “early date”, the ministry said after a meeting between India’s top diplomat and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

Tensions soured between the two nations after the 2020 clash, following which India made it difficult for Chinese companies to invest in the country, banned hundreds of popular apps and severed passenger routes, although direct cargo flights continued to operate between the countries.

Relations have improved over the past four months with several high-level meetings, including talks between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Russia in October.

On Monday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri in Beijing that the two countries should work in the same direction, explore more substantive measures and commit to mutual understanding.

“Specific concerns in the economic and trade areas were discussed with a view to resolving these issues and promoting long-term policy transparency and predictability,” the Indian foreign ministry statement said in a statement.

Their meeting was the latest between the two Asian powers following a milestone agreement in October seeking to ease friction along their frontier.

Reuters reported in June that China’s government and airlines had asked India’s civil aviation authorities to re-establish direct air links, but New Delhi resisted as the border dispute continued to weigh on ties.

In October, two Indian government sources told Reuters that India would consider reopening the skies and launch fast-tracking visa approvals.

Both nations have also agreed to resume dialogue for functional exchanges step by step and with an early meeting of the India-China Expert Level Mechanism, India’s foreign ministry said.

China and India should commit to “mutual support and mutual achievement” rather than “suspicion” and “alienation,” Wang said during the two officials’ meeting, according to the Chinese foreign ministry’s readout. – Reuters

Trump calls on US Congress to boost funding for border security

STOCK PHOTO | Image by Mike from Pixabay

MIAMI – U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said he wants Congress to pass a bill that includes an increase in funding to secure the country’s borders.

Mr. Trump made the comments in a speech to House of Representatives Republicans gathered at his Doral resort in Miami to discuss how to turn the president’s policy priorities into a legislative agenda.

“In the coming weeks, I’m looking forward to working with Congress on a reconciliation bill that financially takes care of our plans to totally and permanently restore the sovereign borders of the United States once and for all,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Trump said the increase should include funding for more border security personnel and retention bonuses for Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel and border patrol agents.

The extra money should also pay for more detention beds, border security infrastructure and barriers, and completion of the border wall along the border with Mexico, Mr. Trump said. – Reuters

Philippines Q4 farm output shrinks for a third straight quarter

PHILIPPINE STAR/EDD GUMBAN

MANILA – The Philippines’ agricultural output shrank for a third successive quarter in the last three months of 2024, although with lesser declines, with reduced crops, livestock and fish production, the statistics agency said on Tuesday.

Farm output contracted 2.2% in the fourth quarter, an improvement on the 3.2% and 3.6% declines of the second and third quarters, respectively. However, the continued fall does not bode well for Philippine growth.

National Economic and Development Authority Secretary Arsenio Balisacan said last week the Philippines may struggle to achieve even the lower end of its 6% to 6.5% gross domestic product (GDP) goal for 2024, due largely to a spate of typhoons that may have also impacted agriculture output.

GDP numbers for the fourth quarter and full year 2024 will be released on Jan. 30. Economists in a Reuters poll expect GDP to have expanded 5.4% in the final quarter, more than the third quarter’s 5.2% growth.

Crop output, which accounted for 58.2% of total farm production, shrank 3.1% from a year earlier, the smallest decline since the second quarter of last year, the agency said.

Similarly, the 6.2% drop in fourth quarter livestock production was less than the previous quarter’s 6.7% decline, while fisheries output contracted by 2.1% compared to a 5.0% drop in the prior quarter.

Poultry production remained in positive territory however, rising 6.1% in the fourth quarter from 5.8% growth in the previous quarter. — Reuters

Nvidia says DeepSeek advances prove need for more of its chips

FILE PHOTO: The logo of technology company Nvidia is seen at its headquarters in Santa Clara, California February 11, 2015. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith/File Photo

SAN FRANCISCO – Nvidia on Monday said Chinese AI firm DeepSeek’s advances show the usefulness of its chips for the Chinese market and that more of its chips will be needed in the future to meet demand for DeepSeek’s services.

Nvidia issued a statement on Monday after its shares tumbled 17%to $118.58 on investor concerns that DeepSeek had matched rivals such as OpenAI using far fewer Nvidia chips than U.S. firms. Nvidia rivalAdvanced Micro Devices’ AMD.Oshares also slid more than 6% to $115.01.

“DeepSeek’s work illustrates how new models can be created using that technique, leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant,” Nvidia said in its statement.

One of DeepSeek’s research papers showed that it had used about 2,000 of Nvidia’s H800 chips, which were designed to comply with U.S. export controls released in 2022, rules that experts told Reuters would barely slow China’s AI progress.

The U.S. microchip export controls were designed to freeze China’s development of supercomputers used to develop nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence systems.

Jimmy Goodrich, a senior adviser to the RAND Corp for technology analysis, said there are at least a dozen major supercomputers in China with significant numbers of Nvidia chips that were legal for purchase at the time that DeepSeek used them to learn how to become more efficient. Computing efficiency has also been a major focus of U.S. AI firms.

“DeepSeek didn’t come out of nowhere – they’ve been at model-building for years,” Goodrich said. “It’s been long known that DeepSeek has a really good team, and if they had access to even more compute, God knows how capable they would be.”

DeepSeek was struggling on Monday to accommodate an influx of new users. Servicing new users is a process that AI firms call “inference,” which Nvidia said demonstrated that its chips will remain in demand.

“Inference requires significant numbers of Nvidia GPUs and high-performance networking,” Nvidia said in its statement.

Nvidia is currently selling a chip called the H20 that is designed to meet the most recent export control regulations. While the restrictions limit the chip’s usefulness for AI training, Goodrich said it is “probably the best chip in the world for inference.”

“How long will Washington allow the best inference chip in the world to be sold to China?” he added. – Reuters

Philippine regions with a higher growth potential than Manila

Edwin G. Pato, SM Investment Corporation’s executive vice president of Treasury, Finance, and Planning, talks about 2GO in the context of Philippine regions with a high growth potential.

Interview by Almira Martinez
Video editing by Arjale Queral

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