Investors scramble to make sense of a shock Chinese challenge to the dominance of western chipmakers

Even for the rollercoaster world of AI, last week was particularly volatile as investors scrambled to keep up with developments that threatened the dominance of the largest western chipmakers.

It began with a double whammy. On Monday, the Chinese memory chipmaker CXMT floated on the Shanghai stock market, soaring by 466% in value to 3.3tn yuan (£365bn).

That same day, it was reported that China had developed its own tools to carry out deep-ultraviolet lithography, a technique essential to the computer chip supply chain over which the Dutch company ASML had held a monopoly.