The start of US President Donald Trump’s second term had taken Washington by storm. Nowhere was this more visible than in the tech sector, whose leading lights competed for the front seat at the inauguration.

Elon Musk is the world’s richest man, and his fingerprints are on many innovations. The owner of X has been a leading player in the evolution of outer space exploration and the e-vehicle revolution. He spent hundreds of millions to get Trump elected.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and a significant player in outer space exploration, was dislodged from the title of wealthiest man by Musk. He was also at the Trump inauguration, cheering on the real estate billionaire president. They were joined by Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta boss; Tim Cook, the head of Apple; and Sundar Pichai, the Google CEO. Shou Zi Chou, the Chinese head of TikTok, was also there.

The US Supreme Court ruled to keep TikTok from the market days before, citing security fears. However, Trump, who initially opposed the Chinese-founded app, vowed to review the ruling and keep it alive in the US.

Days after his inauguration, Trump announced the founding of Stargate, billed as a leading AI trailblazer with an initial capital investment of five billion dollars. He said America was coming back smart and strong to lead innovation in artificial intelligence.

But days later, the big news from China arrived. A start-up company joined the artificial intelligence bandwagon with a product called DeepSeek, which competes with the best in the world but at a fraction of the cost. Most had not seen this coming.

As tends to happen in China, much of the world seems to underrate them. Then China strikes while the world looks elsewhere, in this case, the world’s gaze firmly fixed on Silicon Valley. From Hangzhou, DeepSeek had emerged using a fraction of the chips OpenAI had drawn from to operate ChatGPT, the San Franscisco-based chatbot that writes essays and solves many of the problems posted to it. DeepSeek costs just six million dollars to develop and uses a fraction of the power required to operate ChatGPT. And to crown it, it is open source.

The reaction was immediate and fast, with stock market tech share prices tumbling. Nvidia, the American company that provides the chips used in artificial intelligence technology, lost about 30 percent of its share value, and others were not far behind as more people downloaded DeepSeek instead of ChatGPT. At some point the water will return to its course.

This is the beauty of the tech space. While attention is focused on one area, disruption tends to erupt elsewhere, often from the most unexpected of places. We had experienced this in Kenya before. Hardly anybody saw M-Pesa coming to revolutionise cash transfers.

Before long, however, Safaricom lost the fight and did not keep up the pace. The Chinese WeChat has taken cellphone-based transactions to an entirely new level, and it is hard to predict where innovation may come from next.

While capital provides a significant boost and is an enabler, it is not always easy to predict what peripheral players with limited resources and only armed with ambition and drive can achieve.

The concentration of capital and talent in Silicon Valley provides unmatched capacity. This part of the United States has created a culture of incubation and inspires pushing the boundaries of AI technology; the hope is that a tech tinkler from the least of expected regions can still dream and even achieve the dreams and upset the tech order.

For a long time, Kenya has talked about her Silicon Savannah. However, the country has moved at a snail’s speed in nearly every area. But this race does not wait. China is demonstrating that the dominance of the AI space may not be confined to the traditional giants alone. Upstarts can upset the apple cat. Policymakers, legal framers, and those with ambition can still emerge to play in the big league. This could help democratise the tech space.

— The writer is the Dean of Daystar University’s School of Communication-