DeepSeek’s cut-price challenge to US AI dominance, which wiped $600bn in Nvidia’s market value on Monday and caused the tech-weighted Nasdaq index to drop 3%, also took a bite out of the fortunes of some of the world’s wealthiest men.
Nvidia’s record stock plunge, judged to be the biggest market value drop in US stock market history, according to Bloomberg, took with it $20.7bn of its CEO and biggest individual shareholder, Jensen Huang.
The share-price drop left Huang, the company co-founder, with a net worth of $103.7bn late on Monday, down from $124.4bn. According to Forbes’ real-time billionaires ranking, that pushes the 61-year-old tech tycoon from 10th to 17th place in global wealth rankings, behind Zara fashion mogul Amancio Ortega; Walmart heirs Rob, Jim and Alice Walton; Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates; Dell CEO Michael Dell; and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Exceeding Huang’s paper losses from Monday’s trading is cat rancher and Oracle chair Larry Ellison, who recorded a $27.6bn loss after shares in Oracle stock dropped 14%, knocking him down from third wealthiest man to fifth, behind Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and LVMH luxury tycoon Bernard Arnault.
Others hit by the Nvidia selloff and related tech share drops were Dell ($12.4bn); Google cofounders Larry Page ($6.3bn) and Sergey Brin ($5.9bn); Google investor Andreas von Bechtolsheim ($5.4bn); Tesla CEO Elon Musk ($5.3bn); and Interactive Brokers chair Thomas Peterffy ($4.1bn).
In all, tech sector titans as a group saw $94bn of wealth evaporate – roughly 85% of the $108bn of DeepSeek and Nvidia-related losses among the world’s 500 wealthiest people, according to Bloomberg.
Monday’s tech selloff comes ahead of this week’s fourth-quarter earnings reports from Meta, Microsoft, Tesla and Apple, whose executives are likely to be questioned closely on their multibillion AI spending plans. The losses across the “magnificent seven” – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla – account for around $1tn of their total market value of $17tn.
Some analysts believe the selloff amounted to little more than an overreaction. “I believe the demand for the best AI hardware will persist,” tech analyst Gene Munster said on X. “Hyperscalers, enterprises, and sovereign entities are not looking for a cheaper way to achieve AGI [artificial general intelligence]. They’re looking for a faster way to get there. DeepSeek doesn’t alter that dynamic.”
Don’t “buy into the doomsday scenarios currently playing out” about DeepSeek, Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon wrote to note to clients, adding the “panic over the weekend seems overblown”.
And reports that DeepSeek spent just $5.6m in computing power to develop its R1 model aren’t necessarily correct. Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, told CNBC’s Squawk Box on Monday that Chinese labs have more of Nvidia’s $30,000 H100 chips than people think, and perhaps as much as $1bn worth of the company’s equipment.
“My understanding is that DeepSeek has around 50,000 H-100s, which they can’t talk about obviously because it’s against export controls that the United States has put in place,” Wang said. “They have more chips than other people expect but also on a go-forward basis, they’re going to be limited by chip controls and export controls.”
