S’pore chipmakers will ultimately benefit from DeepSeek’s AI breakthrough

SINGAPORE - The underlying demand for semiconductors made in Singapore will continue to grow, thanks to their limited uptake in the artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem, which has recently been rocked by

DeepSeek’s breakthrough

that showed fewer chips are needed to train large language models for generative AI chatbots.

Most Singapore-based foundries make chips categorised by the industry as “trailing-edge” chips. These chips are less advanced and cheaper than the “leading-edge” chips that form the core of AI accelerators such as graphics processing units (GPUs) made by global leaders Nvidia and AMD.