A mobile shooting game developed by Tencent is using DeepSeek to power an in-game assistant that can, among other things, give players fortune-telling readers about whether they are going to have a great gaming session that day or not. CGN Power, a state-owned nuclear power company, vaguely stated that it has incorporated DeepSeek into its AI system for employees “to understand complex questions and to deal with them efficiently.”

Local governments in China are embracing DeepSeek, too. For example, Shenzhen officials have put DeepSeek-powered applications on the cloud “for all government agencies across the city.” Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, is using DeepSeek to analyze real-time urban management data as part of a smart city program. Thousands of government officials and employees across the country are also attending lectures given by professors or experts at state-owned companies that explain what DeepSeek is and how its technology can be used.

One reason DeepSeek has been so successful is that its open source model arrived at a time when Chinese companies were already looking for ways to transform their products with AI. Its tools are also affordable and easy to use. “Chinese companies experimenting with deployment of AI models for business operations were primed for the release of such a capable open source/weight model, which dramatically lowers costs for deployment,” Paul Triolo, the China practice and technology policy lead at consultancy DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, wrote in a blog post.

For example, as competition between electric vehicle manufacturers in China has intensified over the past few years, automakers were forced to continually develop new smart features capable of dazzling customers, a task that is well suited for DeepSeek’s models. DeepSeek offers “a better and faster interactive experience” while “requiring lower compute costs, which means lower hardware cost,” says Lei Xing, an auto analyst focused on the Chinese market and the former editor of China Auto Review. The technology allows EV companies to do things like quickly build advanced smart assistants without paying for the up-front investment in research and development usually required.

But also, “it’s just cool from a marketing perspective to have integration of one of the most disruptive AI tools and leading LLMs currently available in the world,” Xing says.

Many Chinese companies are “just riding the attention wave,” says Liqian Ren, a quantitative investment specialist at WisdomTree, an investment firm. The Chinese equity market is still heavily driven by public sentiment rather than actual business performance, she says, and investors often shift wildly from being very positive to very negative. Adopting DeepSeek’s models is an easy way for companies to generate media buzz and drum up investor interest.

But there’s also another factor that has helped make DeepSeek particularly trendy in China: the fact that the West freaked out about it. “Its strong reception overseas has further boosted its popularity in China, serving as the firm’s best marketing campaign,” says Angela Huyue Zhang, a law professor who studies Chinese technology policy at the University of Southern California.