Hm even with DeepSeek being more efficient, wouldn’t that just mean the rich corps throw the same amount of hardware at it to achieve a better result?

Only up to the point where the AI models yield value (which is already heavily speculative). If nothing else, DeepSeek makes Altman's plan for $1T in new data-centers look like overkill.

The revelation that you can get 100x gains by optimizing your code rather than throwing endless compute at your model means the value of graphics cards goes down relative to the value of PhD-tier developers. Why burn through a hundred warehouses full of cards to do what a university mathematics department can deliver in half the time?

Maybe but it also means that if a company needs a datacenter with 1000 gpu's to do it's AI tasks demand, it will now buy 500.

Next year it might need more but then AMD could have better gpu's.

It will probably not reduce demand. But it will for sure make it impossible to sell insanely overpriced hardware. Now I'm looking forward to buying a PC with a Chinese open source RISCV CPU and GPU. Bye bye Intel, AMD, ARM and Nvidia.