By Billy Duberstein
Publication Date: 2026-04-01 09:15:00
A little over a year ago, A Chinese quantitative hedge fund-turned-AI lab released an advanced AI model called DeepSeek. While there is some debate about exactly how cheaply and on what chips DeepSeek was trained, there is no doubt that DeepSeek implemented novel innovations that greatly boosted the efficiency of training an AI model with fewer and “less good” semiconductors.
AI semiconductor and memory stocks sold off sharply on the news, based on the surface-level impression that AI companies wouldn’t need to buy so many logic and memory chips. However, we all now know that these stocks subsequently rebounded, and then some, as greater model efficiency didn’t impede chip demand. Rather, AI companies used the efficiency gains to invest in even more advanced models, increasing overall demand for computing power and memory.
Last week, Alphabet‘s (GOOG +2.90%) (GOOGL +3.36%) Google Research released TurboQuant, a software-based AI memory compression technology that enables much more…
