Can You Invest In China's Groundbreaking AI Company, DeepSeek?

DeepSeek took the internet by storm in early 2025, launching as a direct competitor to ChatGPT and other leading large language models. This immediately had savvy investors wondering if it's possible to invest in DeepSeek and capitalize on its rapid growth. In short, the answer is no, because the company isn't publicly traded. Yet investors looking to take advantage of the surging new player on the AI block can leverage its newfound supremacy in the space to invest in other, potentially lucrative opportunities. While plenty of Chinese companies aren't available to investors in the United States, and others can be accessed through direct interaction or third-party exposure, DeepSeek is a new player that hasn't made itself available to retail investors. This doesn't mean you can't take advantage of the new movement in the marketplace, though. Investors who are focused on the larger picture will almost certainly have seen at least one potential avenue for growth as a result of the outlet's surprising surge into the AI conversation.

From contrarian investing to strategies involving seeking out potential beneficiaries, there are actually lots of ways that an intelligent investor could angle themselves in order to benefit directly from the current DeepSeek news. Perhaps more importantly, the reality of the marketplace in this regard is actually quite beneficial to retail investors.

It might seem like a novel take on a new company's breakthrough moment. But the reality is that for everyday investors, the fact that DeepSeek isn't trading publicly is actually a good thing. This is because a new announcement of enormous capability leaps forward would be met with a flurry of buy orders.

When the market is stirred into a frenzy over a company's stock, the brand sees extreme price inflation. It really boils down to a study of economics: When lots of people want to buy a thing, sellers can charge a premium for that good. With a new AI system announced that upends the way the market sees its development, investors would be flooding in to buy up DeepSeek shares, sending the brand's price into the stratosphere. Assuming for a moment that DeepSeek was indeed traded on the market, the problem here is that retail investors aren't likely to have heard of the brand before. Even traders who've sought to invest in AI might not know about the company and would find themselves behind the eight ball on its price inflation. Worse still, investors not on the AI hunt would come flooding in to buy shares even later in the ballooning of its price, driving it even farther up. Ultimately, when buyers make a run on a brand, the company becomes overvalued and typically experiences a kind of Icarus moment where the price plummets back down to a fairer representation of its true value. For traders not already in the know, this very real phenomenon leaves those late to the party vulnerable of losing enormous value by following the crowd after value has already been fully wrung out.

Speaking of Meta (the parent company of Facebook), an article in the New York Times that ran on January 29^th noted the influence that Meta's own AI decision-making has had on companies like DeepSeek. The article talks briefly about the new AI player's position, but spends the majority of its read chronicling the way Meta chose to allow its Llama AI technology to drift out into the world of open-source collaboration.

Companies like Meta are involved in the AI game, but the Facebook progenitor isn't fundamentally tied to the product like Nvidia or Microsoft (companies that have invested directly in AI technology or supply key components for brands that work in the space). Looking to the periphery means exploring how a breakthrough in any marketplace's current state of affairs will affect other brands that don't seem to have a stake in the change directly. Meta isn't competing directly with OpenAI or DeepSeek, but it does stand to gain from improvements in AI systems as a whole, that's why the company opted to make its research an open source repository in the first place. If you can't invest in the market mover directly, it's crucially important to ask yourself who benefits from its success: A cheaper source of gold and other precious metals would be bad for jewelers but great for electronics gear buyers, for instance.

Buying when a stock is reeling is frequently a great opportunity to exploit a short term blip in pricing. On January 24^th, Nvidia was trading at roughly $140, but when Monday rolled around its valuation cratered and shares dipped as low $118. Nearly a week later the company is still trading about 20% lower than five days prior. A 20% loss in value feels like a fire alarm has been pulled for many stock owners, but it shouldn't. Instead, a temporary gut punch like this means that buyers can horde more shares for a lower buy-in price (a central tenant of Warren Buffett's trading mindset).

Globally, the information technology sector saw a tremendous withdrawal of value on Monday the 27^th. It was down 4.7% as a whole, recording losses three times greater collectively than the next worst-performing sector on the day. Oracle (down roughly 9% over the last week), Microsoft (off 7%), and Broadcom (down 8%) all saw precipitous downward movement take effect as the markets opened on Monday. Where these shares' value will head in the coming weeks is truly anyone's guess, but it's objective fact that there's often sizeable power in investing with a contrarian mindset. When the market shows weakness, it's an investor's responsibility to ask why. In this case, indications suggest that these companies are all indirectly (or perhaps directly) affected by a new emergent player. But their businesses aren't focused solely on AI development in the same way that a company like OpenAI is — another brand that isn't publicly traded. This means that they'll likely experience a medium-term hit, and then start to see recovery in their share price, allowing a savvy investor to get in now when the market is undervalued.