The Download: DeepSeek forces a reality check, and robotaxis' future

Just a week in, the AI sector has already seen its first battle of wits under the new Trump administration. The clash stems from two key pieces of news: the announcement of the Stargate project, which would spend 500 billion--more than the Apollo space program--on new AI data centers, and the release of a powerful new open-source model from China. Together, they raise important questions the industry needs to answer about the extent to which the race for more data centers--with their heavy environmental toll--is really necessary. If, in dissecting DeepSeek R1, AI companies discover some lessons about how to make models use existing resources more effectively, perhaps constructing more and more data centers won't be the only winning formula for better AI. This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI.