Seventeen per cent in a day
NVIDIA's share fell 17 per cent in a day, from 142.62 to 118.42 dollars. The press put the loss of market value at 589 billion dollars, CNBC at close to 600 billion: the biggest one-day drop for any company in US history.
Why it matters
The assumption that frontier AI inevitably needs ever more chips cost money, for the first time, to the people who held it.
The cause was not a failure or an earnings report but a model. CNBC tied the sell-off to fear of competition from the Chinese lab DeepSeek and to the model it unveiled in late December, which it said took less than 6 million dollars to build, on NVIDIA's reduced-capability H800 chips. In the DeepSeek-V3 technical report that sum, 5.576 million, covers only the official training run, not the research before it. R1, by DeepSeek's paper of 22 January, was comparable to OpenAI's o1 on reasoning tasks. If that is within reach of a laboratory under export restrictions, the link between accelerators bought and model quality is weaker than had been supposed. The fall was later recovered: the share first closed above 142.62 again on 9 June 2025. Demand for chips did not drop: NVIDIA's data-centre revenue reached a record 35.6 billion dollars in the quarter to 26 January and 39.1 billion in the next. But the day stands as the moment the market said out loud that it doubted the industry's central premise.