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It wasn't exactly the best start to the week for Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang, as the explosion of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek saw his net worth tank by around $20,000,000,000 in just one day.
While many might be more familiar with Nvidia as a PC components company, as they have largely led the world of graphics cards for over two decades, their recent rise has been a result of the AI boom.
Over the last two years the company, with Jensen Huang at the helm, has seen its market cap increase ten fold, going from around $300 billion in 2022 to over $3.6 trillion at the end of 2024.
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This made it for a period of time the most valuable company in the entire world, and that's all down to it's role in the technological development of artificial intelligence software.
Nvidia manufacture many of the chips that are vital to AI development, and with the dramatically increasing demands for associated tech it's only natural that the company, and its CEO, is able to garner significant market capital.
What shocked not only Nvidia but the entire stock market in late January though was the release of DeepSeek - a ChatGPT-like open source AI model from a relatively small Chinese startup, and it only cost around $6,000,000 to develop.
What's staggering is that the company behind DeepSeek used Nvidia's own H800 chips in order to create the tool, and it has since rocketed to the top of the US app charts ahead of all other competitors.
Nvidia definitely felt the effects of this sudden rise, as its shares plummeted by 17%, losing the company around $600,000,000,000 in what is being described as the biggest single-day loss in stock market history.
Huang, as CEO, also suffered significant financial pains as he owns roughly 3.4% of the company, as reported by Fortune, and he saw his net worth tank by $20,100,000,000 in the same time frame.
As per the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Huang has seen some return since the major crash on Monday, recouping around $8.59 billion in the most recent reports, but this has dropped him down to 15th place in the overall rankings.
US President Donald Trump has warned that this shocking event should be a 'wakeup call' for US industry leaders, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has claimed that the Chinese rival is 'impressive' but it has spurred him onto to 'deliver better models' in the near future.
