Jensen Huang likely had an especially bad case of the Mondays when DeepSeek came to town. Of course, as one of the richest people in the world, the co-founder of Nvidia ended up skating away virtually unscathed.

The recent AI advances by Chinese upstart DeepSeek could be the beginning of a potential nightmare scenario that Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Jensen Huang has been worrying about since the chip maker’s meteoric rise.

US chip giant Nvidia suffered a record wipeout on Monday after Chinese startup DeepSeek upended the tech sector — and the rout cost its CEO Jensen Huang more than $20 billion in a single day. DeepSeek said it built its new AI model in just two months for less than $6 million – a fraction of the training costs of its US rivals – and without access to Nvidia’s powerful,

U.S. tech stocks, including Nvidia, Oracle and Broadcom, plummeted Monday after Chinese startup DeepSeek said it created an AI system that can compete against chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT at much lower costs.

The Chinese startup DeepSeek released an AI reasoning model that appears to rival the abilities of a frontier model from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.