The selloff was triggered by the Chinese challenge to US dominance in the AI industry
Nvidia’s stock plummeted 17% on Monday, erasing approximately $589 billion from its market capitalization and marking the largest single-day loss in US corporate history. The sharp decline follows concerns over mounting competition from the Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek.
The selloff was part of a broader tech downturn that saw the Nasdaq Composite fall 3.1%, its worst day since December. Nvidia shares closed at $118.58, marking their most significant drop since March 2020 during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Monday’s plunge also dethroned Nvidia as the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, at $2.9 trillion, pushing it back to third place behind Apple and Microsoft.
The downturn was triggered by DeepSeek’s launch of an open-source R1 model, which the company claims was trained in just two months at a fraction of the cost required by US-based firms like OpenAI. This development has raised questions about the sustainability of high AI-related spending, particularly on Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) that dominate the AI chip market.
Nvidia itself described DeepSeek’s innovation as “an excellent AI advancement,” but argued that it expects demand for its chips to increase rather than diminish. “Inference requires significant numbers of Nvidia GPUs and high-performance networking,” a company spokesperson said in a statement on Monday.
Beyond Nvidia, the selloff extended to other tech and semiconductor companies. Broadcom saw its stock drop 17%, wiping out $200 billion in market value. Data center companies heavily reliant on Nvidia’s chips, such as Oracle, Dell, and Super Micro Computer, also experienced sharp declines of at least 8.7%.
Oracle’s chairman, Larry Ellison, saw his net worth fall by $27.6 billion, the most among affected billionaires, according to Forbes. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s personal fortune dropped by $21 billion, ranking as the second-largest personal loss.
The AI-fueled stock surge of the past two years has made companies like Nvidia central to market confidence. Nvidia’s shares soared 239% in 2023 alone, driven by demand from tech giants like Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon.
The latest development comes amid growing tensions in the AI race between the US and China. Despite US export restrictions on high-end chips, DeepSeek has managed to deliver competitive performance compared to OpenAI’s o1, relying on lower-spec GPUs.
US policymakers have taken note of the competition. Venture capitalist David Sacks, who was appointed as the White House’s AI and crypto advisor under President Donald Trump, called for renewed focus on innovation to counteract China’s advancements.
“DeepSeek’s success shows that the AI race will be very competitive,” Sacks wrote on X, urging the US to avoid complacency. Another billionaire venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen, has described DeepSeek’s emergence as a “Sputnik moment” for American tech.
