The United States has barred federal agencies from using DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence, and investors await Big Tech results after a slide in chip shares. Nscale is in talks on a second $45 billion deal with Anthropic, strikes at Leeds Bradford Airport are on hold and China is promoting APEC’s role in the world economy.
US bars DeepSeek from federal agency systems as China vows to defend its companies
The US Department of Homeland Security has told federal civilian agencies to remove products from the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek from their IT systems, according to a notice made public on Monday in the Federal Register. The order, which dates from late July, also covers third-party products built with DeepSeek technology and bars agencies from buying the company’s products and services. The notice says DeepSeek’s models present multiple threat vectors, citing servers located in China.
The department said Chinese authorities could potentially gain access to private infrastructure and sensitive American data. In Beijing on Tuesday, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said China would firmly protect the legitimate rights and interests of its companies and opposed stretching the idea of national security to politicise technology, economic and trade questions. DeepSeek did not respond to a request for comment. Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are due to meet in mid-November at the APEC leaders’ summit in Shenzhen.
DeepSeek was founded in July 2023 in Hangzhou by Liang Wenfeng, its chief executive, and is owned and funded by the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, which he co-founded in 2015. It launched its chatbot alongside the R1 model in January 2025 and has since released its models under open-source licences, so they are widely available and mostly free to use. Washington still restricts China’s access to the most advanced AI chips and has accused Chinese start-ups of extracting capabilities from leading American models, which Beijing denies.
Big Tech results put the AI trade to the test after a week of losses in chip shares
Investors are turning to a week of quarterly results from large technology companies after semiconductor shares fell sharply on worries about how long heavy spending on artificial intelligence can last. A global index of chip makers dropped 5.8% in the week to Thursday, with Nvidia down 5.2%, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing down 8.4% and Broadcom down 7.8%, while bonds issued by the cloud provider CoreWeave traded at levels that signal distress over its debt and investors moved from growth stocks towards value shares.
Netflix and SpaceX report on Tuesday, followed by Tesla and Meta on Wednesday, with the defence contractors Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and RTX also due during the week. Equity analyst Malik Ahmed Khan said investors would focus on cloud growth at Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon and on capital spending by the largest cloud providers, which is on track to exceed $750 billion this year, about double the 2025 figure. Microsoft has forecast that growth in its Azure cloud revenue will speed up to 45% from 42%.
Big Tech usually refers to Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta, which are among the world’s largest companies by market value and make up about a quarter of the S&P 500 index; Netflix, Nvidia, Tesla and SpaceX are sometimes added. The AI building boom has also raised questions about prices: economists at Goldman Sachs estimate it adds about 0.45 percentage points to a key US inflation gauge, an effect they expect to peak near 0.5 points by the end of 2026 and fade to 0.1 points in 2027.
Nscale is in talks to sell Anthropic about $45 billion more in AI computing power
The British data centre developer Nscale is negotiating a new agreement to supply computing power to Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI models, with a possible value of about $45 billion, according to a person familiar with the talks who spoke on Monday. The deal would cover a second building at Nscale’s Monarch campus in West Virginia, which would deliver 460 megawatts of capacity using Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips. Anthropic agreed in August to spend $45 billion renting computing capacity at the same campus.
The person said Anthropic also holds the right of first refusal on a planned third building and that details could still change; Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment. The talks follow Microsoft’s withdrawal from a deal to anchor a flagship Nscale data centre after delays in connecting power pushed the expected supply date into the 2030s. Investors have grown wary of debt-funded expansion in AI, and shares in the rival CoreWeave fell last week amid concern over its $50 billion debt load.
Nscale, headquartered in London, was founded in 2024 by Josh Payne and operates data centres and GPU cloud infrastructure in several countries, including a site at Glomfjord in Norway that runs entirely on hydropower and a liquid-cooled cluster in Iceland. According to its prospectus, its total contracted value has grown from $100 million to more than $103 billion in two and a half years, and Microsoft and Anthropic are expected to be its main customers. It competes with Nebius, Crusoe and Lambda.
Leeds Bradford Airport strikes over half-term are suspended for new pay talks
Strikes planned by more than 130 workers at Leeds Bradford Airport during the school half-term holiday have been called off to allow fresh pay talks, the Unite union and the airport said. Air traffic controllers, passport control staff and passenger assistance workers had planned to stop work between 23 October and 2 November in a dispute over pay, and the airport said flights and terminal services would run normally throughout the holiday period.
Unite said members had heavily rejected the latest offers and wanted pay parity with Newcastle Airport, where a starting air traffic controller earns about £55,000 compared with about £34,000 at Leeds Bradford; both airports are partly owned by the Spanish operator AENA. Regional officer Neil Whitaker said the union had paused action in good faith but kept a strong mandate. Talks brokered by the conciliation service Acas are expected to begin within days, and the airport said a revised offer remained available.
An earlier walkout by air traffic controllers, due to begin on 16 October, was also suspended after a late offer, which members then rejected; the airport has described its proposal as fair and well above inflation. Leeds Bradford, the largest airport in Yorkshire, opened in 1931 as Yeadon Aerodrome and serves Leeds, Bradford and places such as York, Wakefield and Harrogate. AENA, the Spanish national airport company, bought a majority stake in December 2025 and holds 51%, with InfraBridge owning the remaining 49%.
China says APEC’s role is growing as finance ministers meet in Hong Kong
China’s Finance Minister Lan Foan said on Tuesday that the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum has an increasingly important part to play in helping the world economy deal with its challenges. Opening a meeting of APEC finance ministers in Hong Kong, he described the forum as an engine of global growth that now carries greater responsibility, at a time when the global economy is being shaken by rapid change and by the effects of geopolitical conflicts.
Lan called on the forum’s 21 members, which include the United States, Japan and Russia, to cooperate more closely to support growth. He urged governments to work together on artificial intelligence, the digital economy and green industries, saying these areas would create new sources of expansion, and he said China, the world’s second-largest economy, would keep pursuing comprehensive economic reforms, though he gave no details. The meeting comes weeks before China hosts this year’s APEC leaders’ summit.
APEC began in 1989, after Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke called that January for closer economic cooperation across the Pacific Rim, and its first ministerial meeting took place in Canberra that November. It grew out of the success of meetings held by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations with its partners from the mid-1980s and has its headquarters in Singapore. Its 21 member economies include China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and leaders of every member except Taiwan attend an annual summit whose host rotates.