Finance

Eight automakers including BYD, at least nine financial securities companies, three state-owned telecommunications operators and smartphone brand Honor are among the many that have rushed to integrate with DeepSeek in the last week.
“This is quite unprecedented,” Wei Sun, principal analyst of artificial intelligence at Counterpoint Research, said in an email Monday. She pointed to the rate of adoption, scale of business integration and breadth of specific industries covered.
A big factor in the widespread interest is timing, as well as DeepSeek’s open-source availability in China.

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

BEIJING — Chinese businesses are tapping DeepSeek’s newest artificial intelligence model to see how it can improve productivity.
The Chinese AI model took the world by storm in recent weeks after showcasing its reasoning process and claims to undercut rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT on cost — despite U.S. restrictions on Chinese access to the advanced semiconductors needed to develop the tech.

Eight automakers including BYD, at least nine financial securities companies, three state-owned telecommunications operators and smartphone brand Honor are among the many that have rushed in the last week to integrate with DeepSeek. Cloud computing operators Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent and Baidu have all offered ways for clients to access DeepSeek’s latest model.
“This is quite unprecedented,” Wei Sun, principal analyst of artificial intelligence at Counterpoint Research, said in an email Monday. She pointed to the rate of adoption, scale of business integration and breadth of specific industries covered.
“When we have all of these, we know it’s making a big social and economic impact,” she said.

Optimism over artificial intelligence has spread to Chinese stocks. UBS said Wednesday that AI-related Chinese stocks are up by 15% since the start of the year, outperforming the broader MSCI China Index by 9%.
A big factor in the widespread interest is timing. DeepSeek released its latest R1 model on Jan. 20, and news of its low-cost reasoning capabilities prompted a global tech stock sell-off on Jan. 27 — just as millions of urban workers in China were returning to their hometowns to celebrate the eight-day Lunar New Year holiday.

As a result, less developed parts of China gained greater understanding of AI and its impact, a topic previously limited to conversations in China’s largest cities, said Wenhao Zhang, CEO of the Beijing-based consumer marketing consultancy Doodod.
“It’s a major education of the market. This will push the entire ecosystem’s development,” he said Tuesday in Mandarin, translated by CNBC.
Zhang, who studied AI at Tsinghua University, founded Doodod in 2012 to build customer engagement through social media analysis. He said the company — which counts China Merchant’s Bank and Toyota as clients — started looking at DeepSeek’s offerings late last year, and began using it more after the R1 release in late January.
DeepSeek, founded in 2023 out of a quantitative hedge fund, had released a basic version of R1 in November, and a V3 model in December. It launched a smartphone chatbot app in January.

Open-source local deployment

Another attractive factor for businesses is that DeepSeek’s models are open-source, allowing individuals and companies to download and customize it.
DeepSeek also advertised drastically lower prices for applications to use its tech versus that of OpenAI. ChatGPT is not officially available in mainland China and requires users to provide an overseas phone number and payment method from a supported country such as the U.S.
DeepSeek changed the perception that AI models only belong to big companies and have high implementation costs, said James Tong, CEO of Movitech, an enterprise software company which says its clients include Danone and China’s State Grid.
He said Movitech started integrating an earlier version of DeepSeek in the fourth quarter of last year, helping boost sales by about 25% from the same period in 2023. The company plans to launch a new DeepSeek-integrated application by the end of March to improve clients’ ability to make decisions, he said.
Many recent videos on Chinese social media have showed off how to run a local version of DeepSeek on Apple’s Mac mini.
Apple Mac mini online sales in China climbed significantly from November to January, versus the same period the year prior, according to data from consultancy WPIC. The electronics-focused JD.com site recorded unit sales of around 20,200 in January, up from nearly 19,400 in December and around 12,250 in November, the data showed.
DeepSeek’s affordability is pressuring more expensive AI models to cut prices, enabling more businesses to adopt the tech, said Chim Lee, senior Asia analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit. He added that open-source models allow finance, banking and healthcare businesses — which are subject to stringent data protection rules in China — to develop AI applications locally.
“It is still very early to point to concrete business applications, but a key takeaway is that DeepSeek will accelerate the commoditization of AI,” Lee said.
Beijing is also increasing support. China’s national supercomputing network announced Tuesday that eligible companies and individuals can obtain three free months of DeepSeek access, along with subsidized computing power.
The network is similar to OpenAI’s Trump-backed Stargate project in the U.S. for building AI infrastructure — with the potential for “even faster scaling,” Winston Ma, adjunct professor at NYU School of Law said Wednesday. He is also the author of “The Digital War: How China’s Tech Power Shapes the Future of AI, Blockchain and Cyberspace.” 

Not centered on DeepSeek

The rush to try out DeepSeek doesn’t mean it will be the only AI provider for Chinese companies. Developers in the U.S. and China are regularly releasing new models.
Movitech also uses Alibaba’s Qwen AI model, Tong said, noting that the market wants the tech that can lower costs and produce results the most, whether it’s OpenAI or DeepSeek.
HangHang AI, which has invested several hundred million yuan to develop AI solutions for companies across 20 industries, uses a range of models, said partner and COO Shu Weibing.
Many people first used “Baidu, then realized it wasn’t as good as Kimi, then it wasn’t as good as [ByteDance’s] Doubao, which also cut prices,” Shu said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC. “Now it’s DeepSeek.”
It remains to be seen how much generative AI can boost productivity and profits.
Shu predicts that small businesses and companies that integrate AI with hardware will benefit more than large, consumer-facing internet platforms, whose AI work so far, he said, has focused more on boosting efficiency rather than creating new consumer services.
Despite AI models’ falling prices, “small and medium-sized businesses may still be in a period of wait-and-see” for adopting the tech due to the relatively high cost for a full deployment, including computing power and customization, Mike Fang, senior director analyst at Gartner, said Wednesday in Mandarin translated by CNBC.
But the consulting firm predicts that by 2027, the average price to access a generative AI model will be less than 1% of what it costs now — and that by 2029, 60% of Chinese businesses will have incorporated AI into their primary products and services, forming the top drivers of revenue growth. More

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sent termination notices to several dozen employees, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
The affected staff were mostly those with probationary status, said the people, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly after orders to stop all agency work, including speaking with reporters.
Several of those being laid off had already accepted federal buyout offers, said one of the people.

Acting director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought speaks with reporters during a press briefing at the White House in Washington on March 11, 2019.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sent termination notices to several dozen employees late Tuesday, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
The affected staff were mostly those with probationary status, said the people, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly after orders to stop all agency work, including speaking with reporters.

Being on probation means the employee is in a trial period, often lasting a year or two, after starting a new government position, and does not reflect performance, the people said.
The move comes amid a broader effort under President Donald Trump to trim federal staff. The Office of Personnel Management asked federal agencies for lists of all recently hired workers because they are the easiest to terminate, NBC News has reported. That has stoked fears of layoffs at places as disparate as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Environmental Protection Agency.
CFPB staff have been on edge since late last week, when operatives of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency gained access to the agency. The CFPB headquarters have since been shuttered, while employees were told by acting CFPB director Russell Vought not to do any bureau work. Both Musk and Vought have called for the elimination of the CFPB.

‘First salvo’

“This is an unlawfully-executed mass firing,” said Johanna Hickman, senior CFPB litigation counsel who said she received the agency’s dismissal notice. “It’s almost certainly the first salvo in the dismantling of this agency, and a significant percentage of the federal workforce.”
Hickman, who said she started in her CFPB role in June of 2023, said the agency’s new leadership didn’t follow established federal protocol for dismissing probationary employees. “A lot of us are prepared to fight, and we are examining all our legal avenues,” she said.

The terminations have sowed more confusion at the bureau, as several of those being laid off had already accepted federal buyout offers, said one of the people.
Some being dismissed received form letters that did not include their specific names and titles, but left some fields filled with generic placeholders, said this person.
“Unfortunately, the Agency finds that you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not meet the Agency’s current needs,” the CFPB told some who were dismissed, according to people who received the notices.
The terminations hit the CFPB’s enforcement division in particular because of a push under former director Rohit Chopra to boost hiring of enforcement lawyers, said another person. The agency had about 1,700 employees before the job cuts.
The CFPB declined to comment.

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It all seems to add up to something big. On a daily, sometimes hourly, basis, Elon Musk claims that his team of fiscal commandos has found yet more government fraud, terminated another wasteful contract or even scrapped an entire agency. Mr Musk’s supporters believe that, through tech wizardry and sheer willpower, he is slashing the federal deficit in a way that has eluded politicians for years. But this narrative has a glaring flaw: our review of official data shows that Mr Musk’s efforts have scarcely made a dent in spending. More

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said Wednesday that strong consumer spending so far this year means that the Federal Reserve will probably hold off on cutting its benchmark interest rate.
The bank’s retail customers are spending about 6% more money in the first 40 days of this year compared to the same period in 2024, Moynihan told CNBC’s Leslie Picker.
“That’s driving price firmness, demand firmness,” Moynihan said. “You’re seeing activity that says that we’re probably in a period where rates are going to stay … where they are for a while until this settles in.”

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said Wednesday that strong consumer spending so far this year means the Federal Reserve will probably hold off on cutting its benchmark interest rate.
The bank’s retail customers are spending about 6% more money in the first 40 days of this year compared with the same period in 2024, Moynihan told CNBC’s Leslie Picker. That rate is an acceleration from the spending growth seen in the final three months of last year, he noted.

“That’s driving price firmness, demand firmness,” Moynihan said. “You’re seeing activity that says that we’re probably in a period where rates are going to stay … where they are for a while until this settles in.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported hotter-than-expected growth in the U.S. consumer price index earlier Wednesday, forcing markets to recalibrate rate expectations. The Fed began an easing cycle in September, reducing rates for the first time since the 2020 pandemic, but the central bank is seen as limited in how much it can cut by stubborn inflation.
Last month, the Fed opted to keep its benchmark rate unchanged at a range of 4.25%-4.5%.
“Rates are restrictive, but there was not enough sort of inflation progress that we made” to cut rates, Moynihan said.
Bank of America research analysts expect no rate reductions in the immediate future because of elevated inflation, he added.

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NYSE Chicago, previously the Chicago Stock Exchange, will soon become NYSE Texas.
Last month, TXSE Group announced that it had filed for registration of the Texas Stock Exchange with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Texas has also emerged as a competitor to Delaware as the legal home of major companies.

A person walks past the New York Stock Exchange at Wall Street in New York on Feb. 3, 2025.
Angela Weiss | AFP | Getty Images

The New York Stock Exchange will soon have a presence in Texas to cater to the growing number of companies looking for a home base in the business-friendly state.
The NYSE announced Wednesday that one of its electronic exchanges, NYSE Chicago, will reincorporate in Texas and be renamed NYSE Texas, giving companies an option to list their stocks in the Lone Star State.

“As the state with the largest number of NYSE listings, representing over $3.7 trillion in market value for our community, Texas is a market leader in fostering a pro-business atmosphere,” Lynn Martin, president of NYSE Group, said in a release.
The NYSE is part of Intercontinental Exchange. NYSE Chicago was previously the Chicago Stock Exchange, which was acquired by ICE in 2018.
The move comes as a potential competitor to the NYSE is emerging in Texas. Last month, TXSE Group announced that it had filed for registration of the Texas Stock Exchange with the Securities and Exchange Commission. TXSE Group said it has raised $161 million and intends to launch trading in early 2026.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told CNBC last year that rules around environmental, social and governance, or ESG, was a motivation to have a Texas-based exchange. Texas is one of several states that have pushed back against ESG rules from Wall Street firms.
“We need to make sure that Texas companies, and companies similarly situated, are not going to be cut off from capital markets in New York with policy decisions made from the left in places like New York,” Abbott said.

Texas has also emerged as a competitor to Delaware as the legal home of major companies. Tesla reincorporated in Texas last year after a legal fight in Delaware court over a pay package for CEO Elon Musk. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Meta Platforms was exploring a similar move.
Trading at the NYSE exchanges and most major stock exchanges around the world is done almost entirely electronically. Stocks trade on multiple exchanges even if they have one designated as their primary listing.

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Warren Buffett speaks during the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 4, 2024.

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway purchased more shares of Occidental Petroleum after the oil and gas producer tumbled more than 30% from its record high.
The Omaha, Nebraska-based conglomerate scooped up 763,017 shares of the Houston-based energy company on Friday for $35.7 million, according to a regulatory filing. Berkshire is Occidental’s biggest investor, holding a 28.2% stake.

Shares of Occidental have fallen nearly 32% from an all-time high reached last April. The stock dropped more than 17% in 2024 as oil prices weakened.

Stock chart icon

Occidental shares over the past year

In late December, Berkshire purchased 8.9 million Occidental shares during a broad market pullback. Occidental remains Berkshire’s sixth-largest equity holding.
Buffett has made clear he won’t take full control of the oil company, founded by legendary oilman Armand Hammer. There had been speculation of a takeover after Berkshire received regulatory approval to buy as much as a 50% stake. 
The “Oracle of Omaha” previously said he started buying Occidental after reading a transcript of the oil company’s earnings conference call. Occidental also pays a 1.8% dividend yield and has been investing in a carbon capture business.
Berkshire also owns $10 billion of Occidental preferred stock and has warrants to buy another 83.9 million common shares for $5 billion, or $59.62 each. The warrants were obtained as part of Berkshire’s 2019 deal that helped finance Occidental’s purchase of Anadarko Petroleum.

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Zelle crossed $1 trillion in total volumes last year, which it said was the most ever for a peer-to-peer platform.
The payments network said its user base jumped 12% to 151 million accounts in 2024, and that the total dollars sent on the platform jumped 27% from the year earlier.
Zelle was launched in 2017 in response to the rise of platforms like Venmo, PayPal and CashApp.

Zelle icon displayed on a phone screen and Zelle logo displayed on a screen in the background are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland.
Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Zelle, the payments network run by bank-owned Early Warning Services, crossed $1 trillion in total volumes last year, which it said was the most ever for a peer-to-peer platform.
The firm said Wednesday that its user base jumped 12% to 151 million accounts in 2024, and that the total dollars sent on the platform jumped 27% from the year earlier.

Last year’s payment volumes were “by far the most money ever moved by a P2P payments service in a single year,” Denise Leonhard, general manager of Zelle, told CNBC.
Zelle, which was launched in 2017 in response to fintech platforms like Venmo, PayPal and CashApp, has some key advantages over those players. EWS is owned by seven of the biggest U.S. banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, and Zelle allows for instant money transfers made within the apps of thousands of member institutions.
Its growth rate last year exceeded that of PayPal, which reported that total P2P payments volumes reached more than $400 billion.
Zelle’s meteoric rise comes amid accusations that the network and the three biggest U.S. banks on it failed to properly investigate fraud complaints or give victims reimbursement. The company has introduced measures to reduce fraud and has said that 99.95% of transactions are free of fraud and scams.
Growth is being driven as bank customers increasingly use Zelle instead of cash or checks, and as small businesses adopt the payment option, said Leonhard.
“People are using Zelle in order to do things like pay their rent or paying their nanny,” Leonhard said. “We want to continue to be top of mind for those consumers to be able to use this every day.” More