American labs make expensive bets on training techniques with high failure rates. Individual training runs can cost billions, while firms have committed $5trn of data-centre investment between now and 2030, according to JPMorgan Chase, a bank. Such largesse is challenged by rivals that are nearly as good, but much cheaper. Since DeepSeek released R1, China’s global share of the open-model market has rapidly grown, overtaking America’s, according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.