Nvidia’s $600 Billion Loss: Can China’s DeepSeek Topple US AI Dominance?

In a dramatic turn of events on Wall Street, Nvidia, the US chip-making giant that powers much of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, saw its stock plummet by nearly 17% on Monday. This drop erased an astonishing $600 billion in market value, marking the largest single-day loss in the history of corporate stock value. What triggered this massive sell-off? The emergence of a Chinese AI startup, DeepSeek, which developed a generative AI model that could potentially disrupt the US-dominated AI industry.

DeepSeek’s AI Model: A Cost-Effective Competitor

DeepSeek, a startup based in Hangzhou, China, has developed a chatbot that rivals the performance of leading US AI systems but at a fraction of the cost. The company claims to have spent just $5.6 million on the development of its AI model, a small sum compared to the billions of dollars invested by American tech giants. DeepSeek’s chatbot has quickly gained attention, even climbing to the top spot as a free app on the Apple App Store in the US.

This revelation sent shockwaves through the markets, especially in the wake of the increasing global competition in AI. As Nvidia’s chips are central to powering many of the leading AI models, the news that a Chinese company could achieve…