Chinese startup DeepSeek, which released its R1 AI model earlier this week and caused a sell-off in tech stocks, caused NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s net worth to drop by as much as $20 billion. However, he still had some money left for leather jackets.
Chinese startup DeepSeek, which released its R1 AI model earlier this week and caused a sell-off in tech stocks, caused NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s net worth to drop by as much as $20 billion. However, he still had some money left for leather jackets.
As PC Gamer reports, citing Forbes, NVIDIA was the hardest hit by the market drop, losing 17% of its stock value, equivalent to $600 million of the company’s total valuation. Huang’s personal fortune fell with it, decreasing from $124.4 billion to $103.7 billion. This dropped him from 10th place on the billionaires list to 17th place.
However, Nvidia’s stock price appears to have stabilized since then, and with it, Huang’s fortune — he currently ranks 13th on the list with a valuation of $108.9 billion. This amount is not necessarily money in Huang’s pockets that he «lost,» it’s all theoretical money deducted from his stock holdings, etc.
With all that said, this is a significant drop overall, even if theoretical, and it was directly caused by the release of the R1 model from DeepSeek, which suddenly turned out to be a competitor to similar models from OpenAI and Meta, but supposedly much more economical.
Nvidia’s meteoric rise before the R1 launch was primarily driven by huge sales of AI accelerator hardware. The notion that an open-source model developed by the Chinese could deliver comparable results at a much lower cost spooked investors, and the AI market suffered significant financial losses as a result.
Recall that the excitement surrounding DeepSeek’s success caused a drop in the stock prices of technology companies, including the top graphics processor manufacturer Nvidia, and Mark Zuckerberg rushed to announce that Meta plans to invest $60 billion in 2025 in the development of AI.
In response, Microsoft made OpenAI’s o1 AI model free for all Copilot users.
Previously, dev.ua did a detailed analysis of how DeepSeek managed to outperform its competitors.
