There’s a DeepSeeking Whale in Nvidia’s Moat
The chipmaker that dominated the AI landscape (and stock market) as we knew it has now been deeply disrupted.
Deep disruption.
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News about the biggest US tech groups has become a macro event. Wednesday will see the Fed’s Jerome Powell talk to the press on monetary policy, within an hour of results from Tesla Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Meta Platforms Inc., and it’s not at all clear which will be more important. But most spectacular was the leviathan splash made by the Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek (whose logo is a whale), which suddenly emptied the monopoly moat that has protected Nvidia Corp.’s domination of the AI landscape. On Monday, DeepSeek was more or less solely responsible for cleaving $589 billion from the chipmaker’s market value, and even move currency and bond markets as well. No other single company has ever lost so much in value in one day. Indeed, only a dozen companies currently have that big a market cap in the first place. Nvidia’s loss was equivalent to the entire market value of Oracle Corp.: