TOKYO: Japan’s Nikkei share average shed nearly 1% on Monday as technology stocks slumped following last week’s rally, with investors sizing up the impact of a Chinese AI startup on US tech dominance.
The Nikkei closed down 0.9% at 39,565.80 after initially rising in early trade, while the broader Topix finished up 0.3% at 2,758.07.
Heavyweight technology shares saw sizeable losses, backtracking from gains made last week on news of US investment plans to fund infrastructure for artificial intelligence. Market players are watching DeepSeek after the Chinese AI startup rolled out an open-source reasoning model called DeepSeek-R1 that it said rivalled OpenAI’s o1 on several performance benchmarks.
“There’s concern that the view of American cutting-edge technologies from companies like Nvidia and (OpenAI) as the most globally dominant might start to change a bit,” said Masahiro Ichikawa, chief market strategist at Sumitomo Mitsui DS Asset Management.
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