Shares of Nvidia, the poster child of the AI boom in recent years, dragged U.S. stocks lower, sinking 17 percent on Monday and wiping $593 billion from the chipmaker's market value, a record one-day loss for any company.
The sudden devaluation of the world leader in specialized processors for artificial intelligence (AI) is because the markets are impressed by DeepSeek, a Chinese start-up that released a model with performance comparable to that of leaders OpenAI or Google, but at a lower development cost in computing.
Last week's release of the latest DeepSeek model initially received limited attention, overshadowed by the inauguration of Trump on the same day.
Among the lessons of the DeepSeek saga is never underestimate Chinese ingenuity.