Manaaki New Zealand Scholarship 2025

Application Deadline: 28th February 2025

Tell Me About Award:

New Zealand offers scholarships to eligible citizens from developing countries to study abroad at a New Zealand  education institution or university or at a Pacific university.

The New Zealand Government offers these Manaaki New Zealand Scholarships:

Scholarships for undergraduate and postgraduate study
These are full tertiary scholarships for eligible international students to study fulltime at a New Zealand education institution or a Pacific university.

Short Term Training Scholarships for Pacific and Timor-Leste citizens 
These are short scholarships for skills training and on-the-job work experience for workers from eligible Pacific countries and from Timor-Leste.

Short Term Training Scholarships for citizens of Southeast Asia and Timor-Leste
These are short scholarships for skills training for workers from eligible Southeast Asian countries and from Timor-Leste.

English Language Training for Officials Scholarships (NZELTO)
These are short scholarships for government officials from eligible African and Asian countries to come to New Zealand for English language training.

A Manaaki New Zealand Scholarship will change and enrich your life. Hear from our scholars about why they love studying in New Zealand on scholarship.

Which Courses are Eligible?

Climate Change and Resilience

Food Security and Agriculture

• Agribusiness
• Farm management
• Agricommerce
• Agricultural technology
• Dairy systems
• Agriculture or horticulture management
• Rural development
• Supply chain management

Renewable Energy

• Geothermal, solar, hydro-electric and wind energy
• Energy engineering
• Renewable energy distribution systems and technologies
• Market reform and sector management, including energy economics
• Energy efficiency
• Climate policy

Good Governance

Governance

• Government, public policy, public management, policy and governance

Type:

undergraduate, postgraduate, short course

What Countries are Eligible?

Below are the Lists of Eligible African countries only.

Degree Scholarships

Algeria, Angola, Botswana, Djibouti, Eswatini, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe

Short course:

Algeria, Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Gabon, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Niger, Republic of the Congo, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Togo, Tunisia or an official from Palestine.

Where will Award Take Place?

New Zealand

Who is Eligible?

The Eligibility questionnaire will establish whether you are eligible for a scholarship by checking:

• In which country you hold citizenship
• How long you have been living in your home country
• How much work experience you have
• Whether we provide scholarships to your country

You must complete the eligibility questionnaire before you can apply for a Scholarship.

Age:

To apply for a Manaaki New Zealand Scholarship, you must be 18 years old or older when you start your scholarship. This means if you are 17 years of age when you apply, you must have your 18th birthday before you start your scholarship in semester one.

Exception for Samoa: Applicants applying for the Samoa Foundation intake can be 17 years of age when they commence their scholarship.

There is no upper age limit for applicants. However, we do prefer applicants who are under 40 years of age.

Visa Requirements:

You only need to apply for a student visa if we offer you a scholarship and you accept that offer. But before you apply for a scholarship, we strongly recommend that you check the student visa requirements on the relevant immigration website, linked below. Only those who qualify for a student visa can take up a Manaaki New Zealand Scholarship.

We reimburse some visa and medical costs

Vaccination:

New Zealand’s border settings no longer require all foreign nationals to be vaccinated against COVID-19 before travelling to New Zealand.

However, if you are not currently vaccinated but intend to be vaccinated, we will reimburse you for the cost of your COVID-19 vaccine where a cost is incurred.

Academic & English Language Requirements:

Successful scholarship applicants must meet both the academic entry requirements and the English language requirements determined by each  education institution.

Scholars must contribute to their country’s development:

We also only select scholars who have been living in their home country for 2 years prior to applying for a scholarship. 

Preference is given in selection to applicants who can clearly describe on their application form, how they will improve their country’s social and economic development after their scholarship.

Work experience requirements for scholars:

Postgraduate scholarship applicants and applicants who finished high school more than 3 years ago, must have relevant work experience. Work experience can be paid, unpaid or voluntary, and must meet the following criteria:

• One year of full-time work experience (i.e. 30 hours or more per week), OR
• Two years of part-time work experience (i.e. up to 29 hours per week).

In selection, preference is given to applicants who demonstrate how their proposed course of study aligns to their current work experience. We prefer applicants who will continue working in their current job sector after they finish their scholarship.

There is an exception for school leavers and first year undergraduate students. These two types of scholarship applicant do not need work experience:

• Applicants who are in their final year of Secondary School, OR
• Applicants who are in their first year of tertiary study that was started in the academic year immediately after completing Secondary School.

How are Applicants Selected?

we want scholars with these attributes:

• They have a strong academic ability.
• They show commitment to the social and economic development of their country.
• They are 39 years or younger when the scholarship starts.
• They choose courses that align with our recommended subjects.
• They want to encourage positive relations with New Zealand now and in the future.
• They are seeking to undertake a qualification that progresses on from their highest qualification.

How many Awards?

Numerous

What is Value of Award?

MFAT will fund the following scholarship entitlements:

• Travel from my closest home departure port (air, sea or bus terminal) to the city of an international airport in your home country nominated by MFAT;
• travel under a standard economy class air ticket by the most economical air travel route between an international airport in my home country nominated by MFAT and an airport in New Zealand close to the  Education Institution;
• airport reception and accommodation on arrival;
• An establishment allowance;
• a weekly living supplement to contribute towards basic living expenses for the duration of your scholarship;
• The full cost of tuition fees including compulsory enrolment, orientation and student union fees (course related costs are excluded);
• A return, standard economy class air ticket by the most economical air travel route,
• Insurance which includes health care and travel cover;
• For PhD students and Masters students where research comprises 120 credits or more of the Masters programme and as authorised by MFAT, a research and thesis allowance, and provision for overseas fieldwork travel to the home country, if relevant;
• 2.10 travel under a standard economy class air ticket from New Zealand to the city of an international airport in your home country nominated by MFAT;
• 2.11 travel from the city of an international airport in my home country nominated by MFAT to my closest home departure port (air, sea or bus terminal).

How to Apply?

Citizens from eligible African countries who want to study in New Zealand can apply for a Manaaki New Zealand Scholarship online here.

English Language Training for Officials Scholarships (NZELTO)
These are short scholarships for government officials from eligible African and Asian countries to come to New Zealand for English language training.

Visit Application Webpage for Details

Bridgestone America and Nissan announce plans for major layoffs, thousands slated to lose their jobs

Will Coleman

Tennessee Bridgestone workers protest in July 2022 [Photo: USW L. 1155L]

Bridgestone Americas announced it will be closing its LaVergne, Tennessee tire manufacturing plant later this year and lay off 700 employees from the Nashville area factory. According to a January 23 corporate announcement, the job cuts are part of a “strategic initiative to optimize its business footprint, strengthen its competitiveness, and enhance the quality of the company’s U.S. operations.” 

The 2.2 million square foot factory, which was opened by Akron, Ohio-based Firestone in 1972, will cease production on July 31. The factory has long been operated by Bridgestone Corporation of Japan, which acquired Firestone in 1988, making it one of the largest tire manufacturers in the world.

The plant closure is part of a global job cutting campaign, including the corporate and sales divisions at the Nashville headquarters and reductions in Argentina and Brazil. Roughly 1,760—or nearly four percent—of “our nearly 44,000 teammates across North America and Latin America,” the company said in a statement, “are leaving the company as part of the voluntary and involuntary workforce reductions.”

Earlier this month, the United Steelworkers Local 310L reported Bridgestone had informed union officials it would make “voluntary separation offers” to 130 employees at its Des Moines, Iowa agricultural tire plant. The factory, which once employed 1,800 workers, was down to 875 employees before the new cutbacks.

The LaVerne plant is one of two Bridgestone TBR (Truck, Bus, and Radial) plants. Production of tires for cars and light trucks at the LaVergne plant ended in 2009, leading to the layoff of half the workforce. Production is reportedly being shifted to its TBR plant in Warren County, Tennessee.

Although United Steelworkers officials claim the contract gives laid off workers “preferential hiring rights” at company plants in Des Moines, Akron and Russellville, Arkansas, management has not promised any transfers. “With respect to long-term finished tire production, it will be assumed by existing Bridgestone Americas plants. No jobs are being transferred to or added at other locations,” management declared.

In 2022, the USW bureaucracy blocked a strike by 4,000 workers at six Bridgestone plants, including LaVergne, and pushed through a contract, which the union and management officials claimed would protect their jobs.

LaVergne and the surrounding Rutherford County will be greatly impacted by the sudden closure. The city of LaVergne boasts a population of less than 40,000. A loss of 700 jobs means unemployment for almost 2% of the population.

Bridgestone workers responded angrily in the days leading up to job cut announcement, with several posting comments on the web site thelayoff.com.

“La Vergne got the axe. Who’s next?” one asked. Another pointed to “layoffs being done all week” and speculated on what attacks were coming next, including potential pay cuts.

Another pointed to white-collar layoffs, two weeks ago, saying, “Salary people being let go now. When do they come for the rest of us?” Another commented on the callous nature of job cut announcements, “Of course Bridgestone is doing this virtually. Not even the respect to do it in person.”

Another said, “Welcome to the ‘new’ Bridgestone. They don’t care about you and never have.” A worker replied, “Capitalists don't care about you, they care about profits.”

USW protest as 2022 contract expires at Bridgestone plant in Tennessee [Photo: USW L. 1155L]

According to an article in the Tennessean published January 23, “This is Tennessee's third major layoff of the year thus far, following 65 cuts at Dollar General's corporate headquarters in Goodlettsville two weeks ago and Perdue Farms announcing the closure of its Monterey facility this week. Nissan also announced 9,000 global layoffs in November but has not yet said how many Tennessee workers will lose jobs.”

Last week, Nissan announced it was initiating “voluntary buyouts” to reduce its US workforce by the end of the year. Nissan is cutting shifts at several plants, including a vehicle assembly plant in Smyrna, Tennessee; a powertrain and engine plant in Decherd, Tennessee; and a vehicle assembly plant in Canton, Mississippi.

Nissan will also be cutting jobs in its home market in Japan, halting production of its AD model commercial vehicles later this year and potentially affecting hundreds.

These job cuts are part of the company’s bid to reduce global production capacity by 20 percent and reduce spending up to $2.6 billion by the end of the year. Further job cuts are expected in 2026 as Nissan plans to execute a merger with Honda.

The layoffs at Nissan and Bridgestone are part of a wider effort by transnational automakers to reduce costs as they struggle to control markets, supply chains and profits, particularly in the emerging electric vehicles (EV) market. Confronting lower costing and more efficient Chinese automakers, the global corporations are carrying out a jobs bloodbath.

In the United States, Stellantis has cuts shifts and slashed the jobs of thousands of workers in metro Detroit, Toledo, Ohio and Kokomo, Indiana, as part of global job cuts including Italy, France and the UK. General Motors has slashed jobs at assembly plants in Orion, Michigan and Fairfax, Kansas and continues to pink slip salaried workers at the GM Tech Center in Warren, Michigan. Ford eliminated an entire shift at Ford’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center, resulting in 1,400 job cuts, and Ford recently announced plans to cut 2,900 more jobs in Germany and 800 in the UK.

Water companies paid to pollute UK waterways while consumers face steep rise in bills

Margot Miller

The water industry in England and Wales has told customers to brace themselves for a steep rise in bills from April, when the next five-year pricing plan comes into effect.

The privatised water companies are mired in controversy, responsible for polluting Britain’s rivers and coastal waters with sewage on a grand scale. Supply outages occur due to ill-maintained, leaky pipes after years of underinvestment, while shareholders are rewarded generously at the expense of growing company debt.

The Thames as it flows through east London, with the Isle of Dogs in the centre [Photo by Mai-Linh Doan / CC BY-SA 3.0]

Public health is endangered, with industry regulator Ofwat reporting contamination of domestic supplies and advising against swimming in swathes of Britain’s fresh and coastal waters. Hospitalisations from water borne contaminants are on the rise.

Ofwat has nevertheless determined that the 11 water only and 11 water and wastewater companies can raise customer bills by up to 40 percent over the next five years—to deliver “improvements for customers and the environment”. The customers, not shareholders, are expected to pay for rank corporate malpractice, when there are already 2.5 million people in debt to water companies.

The Labour government led by Sir Keir Starmer came into office in July backed by the trade unions promising to tackle the cost-living crisis, with a “plan to grow the economy and cut your bills for good.”

Not only are water bills set to rise, however, but also energy prices, mortgages and rents, the TV licence and council tax. Analysis by Sky News calculated that average household bills will rise by £270 in April.

The next financial year will see an average rise in water bills of 26 percent, an increase from £408 to £603 or £10 a month, with the steepest rise coming for Southern Water’s customers—an increase of 47 percent (£224) to £703 a year, meaning the cost of water to a household reaching almost £2 daily. The largest supplier, Thames Water, with 16 million customers (including the population of London), will increase bills by 31 percent to £639.

Southern Water, which supplies 4.6 million people, was responsible for secretly dumping 16-21 billion litres of sewage over six years. Owned by infrastructure investment funds, the majority stakeholder at 62 percent is Australian firm Macquarie—Thames Water’s previous owner. Southern Water paid out a total of £2.3 billion in dividends since privatisation in 1989. It now has debts of £6 billion.

Thames Water—now owned by investors from four continents, with Canadian pension fund OMERS holding the largest stake—is on the verge of securing a £3 billion emergency loan to stave off collapse. It’s debt is £15.2 billion, or roughly 80 percent of the company’s value.

Thames Water HQ by the Thames In Reading, Berkshire [Photo by Jim Linwood / CC BY 2.0]

Contrary to company claims that shareholders have received no dividends since 2017, Thames paid £200 million to companies within its owners’ group in the past five years—passed on as interest payments to companies which loaned the group money.

Water privatisation has not befitted the population one iota, only a handful of profiters. Since privatisation in 1989, water companies in the UK paid a total £72 billion in dividends to their shareholders while accumulating £60.6 billion debt as of March last year. According to the Green Party, they paid £1.8 billion a year to shareholders over the last decade. In 2022, 22 company executives received £24.8 billion in salaries and bonuses.

Research in 2017 by the University of Greenwich calculated that consumers in England were paying £2.3 billion more each year in water bills than before privatisation.

Around 20 percent of the average water bill in the UK goes in servicing debts accrued by the water companies. An April 2024, Financial Times reported that in 32 years since privatisation £78 billion has been paid out of utilities, in dividends, and that expenditure on capital investment comes from borrowing to protect dividends. The FT noted that the “£78bn payout is nearly half the £190bn the companies spent in the same three decades on infrastructure. The utilities meanwhile chalked up more than £64bn net in debt over the same period, despite being sold at privatisation with no borrowings.”

Yet head of Southern Water Lawrence Gosden had the gall to tell parliament’s Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee this month that what he claimed were 15 years of “flat bills” were a “lost opportunity for investment.” Chief executive of industry body Water UK David Henderson even accused Ofwat of restricting companies’ investment by limiting the latest price rise to 40 percent.

It is corporate looting which has produced the UK’s sewages crisis, with the industry discharging raw sewage into rivers and seas for at least 3.6 million hours in 2023.

Thames Water was responsible for pumping at least 72 billion litres of sewage into the River Thames which runs through London, the equivalent of filling 29,000 Olympic swimming pools with the toxic waste. It has also released raw sewage into a chalk stream near St Albans for 1,000 hours over six weeks since December, and into the River Ver for 85- hours last April.

A new study by researchers from the University of Manchester accused nine water companies—including United Utilities which serves Greater Manchester and the North West—of lying to the public about the harm they cause to the environment and public health. Professor Jamie Woodward told the Manchester Evening News that “colossal volumes of sewage” were released into the rivers of Greater Manchester. They discharged 12,000 times into the River Irwell—which runs through the centre of two large cities (Manchester and Salford)—the highest rate in any river in England.

The River Irwell, Manchester

According to a court case currently being taken against Thames Water, Severn Trent Water, Northumbrian Water, United Utilities, Anglian Water and Yorkshire Water, the companies “significantly or systematically” underreported their sewage discharge for a decade, allowing them to charge higher bills—costing customers between £800 million and £1.5 billion.

Fines imposed by Ofwat are in any case minimal: just £151 million since 2015, though an additional £168 million is now being sought. A Liberal Democrat analysis of Companies House data found that water companies saw their pre-tax profits soar by 82 percent since 2019, with profits almost doubling after tax.

There have been calls for the Labour government to renationalise the water industry. But Starmer’s Thatcherite party is dead set against doing so, to the point of citing a report commissioned by the private water companies themselves as an argument against it last September. If it is forced to take on control of a bankrupt Thames Water, this will be done to salvage some of the stakeholders’ investments and prepare the company for resale to new private owners in the future.

The example of Scotland, where water was not privatised, shows that government ownership is no guarantee against sharp price rises. Bills there are set to increase by 9.9 percent or an average of £44 a year.

Western-backed HTS Islamists organise executions in Syria

Johannes Stern

Members of the new Syrian security forces stand outside a security building in Nawa, near Daraa, Syria, January 4, 2025. [AP Photo/Mosa'ab Elshamy]

Reports of excessive violence and executions of members of religious minorities are increasing following the seizure of power by the Islamist HTS militia in Syria. According to a report by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) from earlier this week, 35 extrajudicial executions took place in just 72 hours. The perpetrators were fighters from the ruling HTS (Haiat Tahrir al-Sham–Levant Liberation Organisation) and other Islamist terrorist groups associated with HTS.

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights stated that the fighters “took retaliatory measures and settled old scores with members of the Alawite minority, to which [ousted President] Bashar al-Assad belongs,” taking advantage of “the state of chaos, the proliferation of weapons and their links with the new authorities.”

The monitoring centre spoke of “arbitrary mass arrests, cruel mistreatment, attacks on religious symbols, mutilation of corpses, summary and brutal executions of civilians,” which “show an unprecedented level of cruelty and violence.” The victims were “members of minority sects such as Alawites, Shiites and Murshids in villages throughout the [Homs] region,” the centre said.

In a statement, the Civil Peace Group also announced that there had been civilian casualties in a “security operation” in several villages in the Homs region. The group “condemned the unjustified violations,” including the killing of unarmed men. According to SOHR, arrests were made after the “serious violations and mass executions that have claimed the lives of 35 people in the last 72 hours.”

A US-backed opposition fighter steps on a broken bust of former Syrian President Hafez Assad in Damascus, Syria, Sunday December 8, 2024. [AP Photo/Hussein Malla]

Apparently, the HTS authorities, who regularly justify the Islamist terror against minorities as a crackdown on alleged supporters of the Assad regime that collapsed in early December 2024, felt compelled to distance themselves from the violent excesses to a certain extent. Several people have been arrested for unspecified “violations” in the area west of the city of Homs, which is home to over a million people, according to government sources.

The official Syrian news agency SANA reported that the authorities had accused members of a “criminal group” of posing “as members of the security services.” “Dozens of members of local armed groups under the control of the new Sunni Islamist coalition and who participated in the security operations have been arrested,” the SOHR report said.

In fact, the terror reveals the character of the HTS regime, which is supported and courted by the West. The militia is the successor organisation of the al-Nusra Front, which was formerly allied with al-Qaeda. Its former emir, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who was appointed Syrian transitional president on 29 January under his real name, Ahmed al-Sharaa, swore “allegiance” to the then al-Qaeda leader Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri in a video message in 2013. In response, al-Qaeda provided al-Julani with fighters and weapons that al-Nusra used for deadly terrorist attacks that killed countless civilians.

Another notorious Islamist terrorist in al-Julani’s transitional government is Justice Minister Shadi al-Waisi. In his role as an al-Nusra Front judge, he personally took part in and organised public executions. A video recorded in Hafasraja in 2015 shows al-Waisi ordering the execution of a woman he had previously convicted of prostitution. In the video, he can be seen first personally pronouncing the sentence and then giving the executioner a sign to carry out his bloody work. The execution was carried out with a shot to the head. 

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Since taking power in Damascus last December with the support of NATO forces, the HTS leaders have continued the terror despite their publicly more moderate rhetoric. The latest executions are just the tip of the iceberg. Since the beginning of 2025, “there has been a dramatic escalation of attacks and retaliatory actions by armed groups in various Syrian provinces,” according to another SOHR report. Some of these groups are affiliated with the Military Operations Administration, i.e., the new government, and “attack civilians for political and sectarian motives.”

Since the beginning of the year, SOHR has documented 91 murders and eliminations as a result of reprisals in various Syrian provinces, killing 190 people, including five women, the report said. Among others, there have been deaths in Damascus (3), Rif Dimashq (14), Homs (91), Hama (46), Latakia (15), Aleppo (6), Tartus (9), Idlib (4), al-Suwaida (1) and Deir Ezzor (1). 

It is significant that the Western media hardly report on Islamist terror in Syria. The reasons for this are obvious. On the one hand, the NATO powers see the new rulers in Damascus as important allies in the imperialist subjugation of Syria and the entire Middle East. As with the genocide against the Palestinians, the main aim is to strengthen Israel’s military position and to eliminate Iran and Russia as power factors in the region. At her meeting with al-Julani in Damascus at the beginning of January, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) called for Russia to give up its military bases in Syria.

Another reason for the silence, especially in the German media, is the plans of the ruling class to deport hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees. Chancellor Olaf Scholz stated in the Bundestag (parliament) on Wednesday, in a session which was dominated by anti-refugee agitation and the boosting of the fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD): “We are also looking very closely at developments in Syria. As soon as the situation on the ground allows, we will also carry out deportations of criminals there.” He said he was discussing this “with the heads of government of the federal states, just as we have repeatedly made far-reaching decisions in this circle in recent years.”

DeepSeek has shattered basis of US AI stock market surge

Nick Beams

The bleeding on Wall Street caused by the emergence of the hitherto relatively unknown Chinese AI company DeepSeek has been staunched, at least for now, with the market regaining some of the $1 trillion loss it incurred in the selloff on Monday.

The Icon for the smartphone apps DeepSeek is seen on a smartphone screen in Beijing, Tuesday, January 28, 2025. [AP Photo/Andy Wong]

But much as some would like to dismiss the losses as a mere flesh wound there is no question that the emergence of DeepSeek, providing AI based on chips below the top range and at a lower cost than the US tech giants, has shattered the assumptions on which the AI boom of the past two years has been based.

The key assumption was that with the development of advanced AI chips by Nvidia and massive investments by the major tech giants in the establishment of data centres for AI development, US companies would enjoy global superiority and accumulate continuously elevated profits due to their monopoly position.

This was reflected in the rise of Nvidia which went from a mid-sized company involved in the development of graphics to the largest company in the world by market capitalisation—more than $3 trillion—in the space of just two years.

Nvidia chief Jensen Huang predicted that $1 trillion worth of AI processing centres, using chips from his company, would be built by the high-tech giants over the next few years.

Of course, there was always the risk that some other company would develop a competitive technology. But such risks were ignored in the market hype which saw the tech-heavy NASDAQ index rise by 92 percent in two years, increasing market capitalisation by $14 trillion.

And the last place any significant competition might have been expected to come from was a start-up Chinese firm. After all the US was the dynamic innovator and China was a mere imitator.

To reinforce its position the US, initially under the first Trump administration and to a much greater extent under Biden, imposed a series of export controls and other restrictions on China to deny it access to the top-level chips.

But using lower-level Nvidia chips to which it had access, DeepSeek was able to develop an AI system comparable to, and in some cases better than that produced by the US tech giants. And this was accomplished in little more than two years.

DeepSeek was initially developed by Liang Wenfeng as a side project for his hedge fund in 2023. He began accumulating a stockpile of lower-grade Nvidia chips and developed a strategy for overcoming the export control bans imposed by the US.

This involved recruiting graduates from top Chinese universities and tasking them with developing methods to “train” AI systems without having to use the latest banned Nvidia technology. Liang said he preferred less experienced graduates because they were not bound by the perceived way of doing things.

Whatever the immediate movements on the stock markets, the assumption that deploying massive piles of cash to create new facilities using the most advanced chips creates an unassailable position in the market has gone by the board.

As AI venture capitalist Mike Volpi told the Financial Times (FT): “If you’re Anthropic or OpenAI, attempting to be at the forefront, and someone can serve what you can at a tenth of the cost, that’s problematic.”

The problems extend well beyond the AI industry. They reach into the stock market and the financial system more broadly because the boom in AI stocks has been the driving force behind the rise of Wall Street over the recent period.

The seven largest companies, mainly hi-tech, with Nvidia at the forefront, account for at least 34 percent of the market capitalisation of the S&P 500 index, the highest figure on record according to Goldman Sachs data going back to 1980.

Nvidia alone accounted for 6.8 percent of the S&P 500 on Friday last week, up from 1.1 percent at the end of 2022 when the AI boom began. It contributed almost a quarter of the index’s total return in 2024, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

Last Monday Nvidia’s share price tumbled by almost 17 percent, leading to a loss of nearly $600 billion in its market capitalisation, the biggest single-day loss by any company in history.

The broader implications of Monday’s events were outlined by billionaire Ray Dalio, the founder of the hedge fund Bridgewater, in an interview with the FT earlier this week.

He likened the present situation to the collapse of the dotcom bubble at the turn of the century with the development of the internet.

Dalio warned that “pricing has got to levels which are high at the same time as there’s an interest rate risk, and that combination could prick the bubble.”

There are of course similarities with what took place a quarter of century ago, but the present situation is much more serious. This is because the past 25 years has seen a massive injection of money into the financial system, the result of so-called quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve and other central banks, the rise of private credit and the escalation of debt to unprecedented levels.

Dalio raised an important distinction between AI and the stock market. He said there was a “major new technology that certainly will change the world and be successful. But some people are confusing that with the investments being successful.”

In other words, while AI has the potential to bring enormous advances in the productive forces of society, its development under capitalism, amid rampant speculation, can bring about a market collapse.

The US high-tech giants have taken a major hit as has the US political and military establishment which considers the suppression of Chinese technological development an existential question for US global dominance.

Accordingly measures to counter DeepSeek are already being rapidly prepared.

Responding to Monday’s events, Trump said: “The release of DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win.”

Given Trump’s record during his first term when he introduced measures to try to bankrupt the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, the threat contained in his words is clear.

Summing up the significance of DeepSeek’s advances, an FT editorial noted that “China is managing to make technological leaps in AI despite export controls by the Biden administration intended to deprive it of both powerful chips and the advanced tools needed to make them.… Far from stifling Chinese innovation, Washington may have stimulated it.”

That is, it has kicked an own goal to use an analogy from soccer.

The ability of domestically trained Chinse engineers to increase efficiency and develop workarounds “raises questions over whether the technological ‘moat’ established by high-spending US groups such as Meta, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic is as wide and impregnable as they had thought,” the editorial continued.

A recent article in the WSJ cited the remarks of Dmitri Alperovitch, a writer on US-China security issues, which point to the direction of possible counter-measures—an all-out offensive denying Chinese access to any US-made chips.

“The piecemeal half-in, half-out approach to export controls is a failure,” he said.

Michigan Republican Congressman John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, told the WSJ: “We must work to swiftly place stronger export controls on technologies critical to DeepSeek’s AI infrastructure.”

The propaganda campaign for the escalation of economic warfare against China is already in motion, like a well-oiled machine, spewing out the claim that DeepSeek’s advances are the result of theft.

David Sacks, a big investor in internet and high-tech firms, who has been appointed as Trump’s AI and crypto czar, told Fox News it was “possible” that intellectual property (IP) theft had occurred.

“There’s a technique in AI called distillation… when one model learns from another model [and] kind of sucks the knowledge out of the parent model.

“And there’s substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI models, and I don’t think OpenAI is very happy about this.”

Sacks, however, provided no evidence for this claim. In any case, all AI companies train their models through the use of information culled from the internet, if not through distillation from competitors.

The initial response of OpenAI chief Sam Altman was to call DeepSeek’s RI an “impressive” model and say that it was invigorating to have a new competitor.

Within days, however, he was singing a very different song as the implications of what had happened started to sink in.

A statement issued by OpenAI said it knew that China-based and other companies were constantly trying to distil the models of leading US AI firms.

“We engage in countermeasures to protect our IP… and believe as we go forward that is it critically important that we are working closely with the US government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take US technology.”

Numerous comments have pointed to the use by OpenAI of technology and intellectual property developed elsewhere and the hypocrisy of its claims that DeepSeek has stolen its IP.

One of the most strident came from American AI journalist and author Ed Zitron in a recent newsletter.

“Personally, I genuinely want OpenAI to point a finger at DeepSeek and accuse it of IP theft, purely for the hypocrisy factor. This is a company that exists purely from the wholesale industrial larceny of content produced by individual creators and internet users, and now it’s worried about a rival pilfering its own goods?”

The same issue was raised, albeit in somewhat more measured tones, by FT columnist John Thornhill.

“As with other Chinese apps, US politicians have been quick to raise security and privacy concerns about DeepSeek. And OpenAI has even accused the Chinese company of possible breaches of intellectual property rights. Given the cases against OpenAI for infringing others’ copyright, though, that might strike some as rich,” he wrote.

Beyond the issue of hypocrisy, there is a much deeper question which goes to the very nature of the capitalist profit system and its fundamental incompatibility with the development of the productive forces of society.

There is no question that AI provides the basis for tremendous economic and social advancement.

But within the social relations of capitalism, based on private ownership of the means of production and private profit, this advance, arising not from the supposed “genius” of the Sam Altmans and Elon Musks but through the collective labour of millions all over the world, is monopolised for profit.

And if that is challenged in any way, then the monopolies and the imperialist governments which serve their interests resort to economic warfare which, inevitably and necessarily, contains within it the germinating seeds of military war.