January 29, 2025
By Nasser Kandil
• No sooner had U.S. President Donald Trump triumphantly announced the promising achievements of his agreements with American tech companies to dominate and lead the artificial intelligence market, pledging $500 billion to develop this sector, than China delivered a surprise.
• Within two days, global markets and stock exchanges were preoccupied with the dramatic shift in the stock prices of American tech companies, which experienced a catastrophic decline. The reason? China unveiled its AI program, DeepSeek, which demonstrated exceptional superiority over its prominent American counterpart, ChatGPT, in multiple fields, alongside its competitive pricing.
• American companies acknowledged their defeat, and Trump admitted the setback to his project. However, the losses continued to pile up, particularly for tech giant NVIDIA, which lost 17% of its stock value, immediately shedding over $600 billion in market capitalisation. This also caused the world’s wealthiest billionaires to lose $100 billion due to the impact on their investment portfolios.
• Trump’s many ambitions could face similar disasters. His remarks about Canada’s potential annexation and the interest in joining the U.S. sparked a national uproar in Canada, which rejected the idea, contrary to Trump’s expectations. In Panama, officials declared their refusal to return the canal and readiness to confront any threat of military invasion. Meanwhile, Denmark officially announced it would not cede Greenland.
• The issue of illegal immigrants, which Trump bet would be a winning card among his campaign promises, has backfired. Half of the states have refused to cooperate, citing the measures applied to these immigrants as clear violations of human rights. Meanwhile, labour costs have risen due to fears of employing these migrants.
• Trump’s executive actions, whether targeting LGBTQ+ individuals by removing them from the military or preparing a comprehensive tariff package affecting both allies and adversaries, raise questions about the balance of gains and losses. It remains unclear how alternative supply chains will be secured for imported goods that form the backbone of American consumption. Moreover, there is the issue of tariffs and their effect on prices, which could burden the very consumers whose cost reduction was supposed to be a central goal of the campaign?
