DeepSeek Sinks Nvidia, Binance, Oracle, Dell Wealth
The world’s 500 richest people, led by Nvidia Corp. Co-founder Jensen Huang, lost $108 billion on Monday as major indices plummeted due to a tech-led selloff linked to Chinese artificial intelligence developer DeepSeek.
The biggest losers were billionaires whose wealth is tied to artificial intelligence: Huang’s fortune dropped by 20%, to US$20.1 billion, while Oracle Corp.
Although the loss for co-founder Larry Ellison was greater in absolute terms, it only accounted for 12% of his wealth, as the Bloomberg Billionaires Index reported. Michael Dell suffered losses of US$13 billion. Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, a co-founder of Binance, lost $12.1 billion.
The tech titans lost $94 billion in wealth or about 85% of the Bloomberg index’s overall decline. The S&P 500 fell 1.5 percent, while the Nasdaq Composite Index fell 3 percent.
Nvidia and Oracle were among several Big Tech companies that suffered on Monday as DeepSeek’s large-language model, which was allegedly created for a small portion of its American rivals, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, raised concerns about whether businesses will continue to invest heavily in the technology required to support and train generative AI.
Although the Hangzhou-based AI firm has been creating AI models since 2023, many Western investors became aware of the company this past weekend when its free DeepSeek R1 chatbot app topped global download charts. DeepSeek experienced outages and had to limit signups to users with Chinese phone numbers to maintain the app’s availability.
DeepSeek’s dark horse entry into the AI race, which it claims only cost $5.6 million to develop, challenges Silicon Valley’s claim that creating the best models requires significant capital expenditure.
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