What Big Tech Execs Have Said About DeepSeek as US Contemplates Ban

In recent weeks, a wave of Big Tech companies reported quarterly earnings, including six of the so-called Magnificent 7 firms. This came shortly after Chinese AI startup DeepSeek shook the stock market with its new, cheap artificial intelligence models, which investors saw as an ominous sign for US tech stocks. DeepSeek’s innovations led to a significant market reaction, with AI darling Nvidia (NVDA) seeing $600 billion shaved off its market cap in a single day—the biggest loss in stock market history. Investors worried that Big Tech would slow its spending on AI hardware.

Now, some US lawmakers are pushing to ban the app from government-owned devices, according to the Wall Street Journal. On earnings calls with investors, executives across these firms praised DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence models, dismissed them, or attempted to avoid the topic altogether. Here’s what they said.

Microsoft (Jan. 29)

Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella embraced DeepSeek, mentioning the firm in his opening remarks on a post-earnings call on Jan. 29. Nadella pointed to Microsoft’s move to put DeepSeek’s latest AI model on its developer platforms, Azure AI Foundry and GitHub, adding that it went through “automated red teaming, content safety integration, and security scanning.” He said customers will soon be able to run DeepSeek’s models locally on Microsoft’s AI PCs. “I think DeepSeek has had some real innovations,” Nadella said, adding that he sees AI getting “commoditized.” “For a hyperscaler like us, a PC platform provider like us, this is all good news as far as I’m concerned.”

Meta (Jan. 29)

Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg was relatively nonchalant about the DeepSeek frenzy. When questioned on whether the potential for lower-cost AI models would affect Meta’s capital expenditures, the chief executive said in a call following the company’s latest quarterly earnings: “I don’t know—it’s probably too early to really have a strong opinion on what this means for the trajectory around infrastructure and capex and things like that.” But DeepSeek is also competition for Meta, which has sought to make its open-source Llama AI models the global standard. DeepSeek’s models are also open source. “I also just think in light of some of the recent news, the new competitor, DeepSeek from China … it’s one of the things that we’re talking about is there’s going to be an open-source standard globally,” Zuckerberg said. “And I think for our kind of own national advantage, it’s important that it’s an American standard.”

Apple (Jan. 30)

Asked for his “worldly perspective” on “the DeepSeek situation,” Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook said in a post-earnings call Jan. 30 that “innovation that drives efficiency is a good thing” and noted that the iPhone maker takes a “very prudent and deliberate approach to our expenditure.” Apple shares jumped more than 3% the same day DeepSeek released its latest R1 model.

Google (Feb. 4)

When asked about what DeepSeek’s low-cost model means for Google (GOOG), CEO Sundar Pichai said that while DeepSeek’s team has “done very, very good work,” he thinks Google’s Gemini Flash models are better. “I would say both our 2.0 Flash models, our 2.0 Flash thinking models, they are some of the most efficient models out there, including comparing to DeepSeek’s V3 and R1.” “And I think a lot of it is our strength of the full-stack development [Google makes its own custom AI chips as well as AI models and the software that runs on them], end-to-end optimization, our obsession with cost per query,” Pichai added. “I think part of the reason we are so excited about the AI opportunity is, we know we can drive extraordinary use cases because the cost of actually using it is going to keep coming down, which will make more use cases feasible.”

Amazon (Feb. 6)

Amazon (AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy said he thinks that DeepSeek’s models won’t spark a downturn in AI investment. “Sometimes people make the assumptions that if you’re able to decrease the cost of any type of technology component, in this case, we’re really talking about inference [running AI models], that somehow it’s going to lead to less total spend in technology. And we have never seen that to be the case.” Jassy pointed to the company’s aggressive spending on developing its cloud infrastructure in the early 2000s, even as costs came down. He’s right, at least for now. Meta, Alphabet, Amazon