China said Tuesday that it is investigating Google for potential antitrust violations after the Trump administration levied new tariffs on Beijing.
The Chinese State Administration for Market Regulation announced in a press release that it is probing the tech giant over suspicions it violated the country’s anti-monopoly laws.
The investigation is the latest apparent retaliation to President Trump’s 10 percent tariffs on China. In addition to Beijing, the president also imposed 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico over the weekend, although both countries reached agreements for a 30-day pause.
China responded Monday with a 15 percent tariff on liquefied natural gas and coal and a 10 percent tariff on crude oil, pickup trucks, agricultural machinery and large-displacement cars.
It also announced plans to impose export controls on several critical elements, including tellurium, bismuth, tungsten, indium and molybdenum.
“The US’s unilateral imposition of tariffs seriously violates the rules of the World Trade Organization,” China’s State Council Tariff Commission said. “It is not only unhelpful in solving its own problems but also undermines the normal economic and trade cooperation between China and the US.”
The tech industry is likely to be a key factor in the U.S.-China trade war. The U.S. had already placed strict export controls on advanced chips under the Biden administration in an effort to stymie Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) development.
The recent emergence of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has raised questions about the effectiveness of export controls and American firms’ approach to developing AI.
DeepSeek claims its new R1 model can perform on par with OpenAI and was developed with just a couple thousand reduced-capacity chips for a final price tag of $5.6 million.
This threatened to upend the current consensus on AI development, which assumed that new models would require vast investment in AI infrastructure. American AI firms, like OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft, have committed billions of dollars to securing chips and building out data centers.
After DeepSeek surged to the top of the Apple App Store last week, investors panicked, triggering a significant sell-off in the tech sector that saw chipmaker Nvidia lose $600 billion in a single day.
However, some have cast doubt on DeepSeek’s claims about its R1 model, including the total cost of training and whether more advanced chips were used. U.S. officials are reportedly investigating whether DeepSeek managed to circumvent American export controls to obtain advanced chips through Singapore, according to Bloomberg.
