A chatbot made by Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has rocketed to the top of Apple’s App Store charts in the US this week, dethroning OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app.

The Chinese AI service has Wall Street worried that it will be cheaper than expected to develop models. But as chip stocks sink, some analysts see a silver lining.

Barrett Woodside, co-founder of the San Francisco AI hardware company Positron, said he and his colleagues have been abuzz about DeepSeek.