Nvidia tumbles and tech stocks slide premarket as China's DeepSeek spooks AI investors

• Nvidia fell more than 13% and Nasdaq 100 futures dived after Chinese startup DeepSeek spooked investors.
• DeepSeek showed last week that it’s quickly catching up with OpenAI’s offerings.
• AI-related stocks including SoftBank and ASML fell sharply, while Microsoft is set to open lower.

Global tech stocks took a battering on Monday after an unexpected launch by Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek spooked AI investors.

In the US, Nasdaq 100 futures were down 3.3%, and chip trailblazer Nvidia tumbled as much as 14% ahead of the opening bell before before regaining some ground.

It closed on Friday worth almost $3.5 trillion after Nvidia stock gained almost 130% over the past 12 months. Jensen Huang‘s company stands to have hundreds of billions wiped off its value if it closes down by double digits on Monday, however.

Microsoft was 5.3% lower ahead of the bell, while Palantir fell 6.2% and Alphabet dipped 3.5%.

Dutch chip equipment maker ASML also fell more than 10% in morning trading in Amsterdam.

In Asia, OpenAI investor SoftBank fell more than 8%, while Tokyo Electron slipped 4.9%. Japanese chip companies Disco Corp and Advantest, a key supplier to Nvidia, were also down 1.8% and 8.6% respectively.

The declines come after DeepSeek unveiled a new flagship AI model called R1 that showcases a new level of “reasoning.” The Chinese AI lab’s solution, released in a paper last Monday, was close in capability to OpenAI’s model while being far cheaper.

OpenAI fully released o1 — “models designed to spend more time thinking before they respond” — to a positive reception in December.

DeepSeek has shown how quickly it can close the gap, sparking fears among investors, politicians, and developers about how long the US can maintain supremacy in the AI race.

“While they don’t offer the cutting-edge tech of Nvidia’s graphics processing units, the efficacy of the budget version and the willingness of DeepSeek to share its know-how may start to chip away at Nvidia’s dominance,” said Hargreaves Lansdown’s Susannah Streeter.

Buying opportunity

Competing US and Chinese spheres of AI influence look set to emerge, Streeter added.

Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities wrote in a morning note that the AI-related slide represented a rare buying opportunity, particularly for Nvidia.

“No US Global 2000 is going to use a Chinese start-up DeepSeek to launch their AI infrastructure and use cases. At the end of the day there is only one chip company in the world launching autonomous, robotics, and broader AI use cases and that is Nvidia. Launching a competitive LLM model for consumer use cases is one thing … launching broader AI infrastructure is a whole other ballgame and nothing with DeepSeek makes us believe anything different,” he wrote.

Since last Monday, the DeepSeek app has hit No. 1 on the Apple App Store’s Top Free Apps Chart. Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen wrote on X that DeepSeek’s R1 was one of “the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs” he’d ever seen.

President Donald Trump is pushing for the US’s AI development to accelerate. He signed an executive order on Thursday calling for the US “to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance” and has said his administration will invest $500 billion in an AI infrastructure investment project called Stargate.

“The AI super-race is seeing new challengers emerge and not everyone is going to win. The companies that enjoyed first-mover advantage will now be under pressure to launch something even better or be left behind,” said Russ Mould, an AJ Bell investment director, in a morning note.

“These market movements suggest investors are worried about disruption to what has so far been an easy ride for most stocks linked to the AI theme.”

The high-performance budget offering from DeepSeek will also “put into question the necessity of spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Nvidia chips and development going forward,” said Joshua Mahony of Scope Markets.

Potential upside

DeepSeek’s advances show that the huge investment undertaken by big tech hasn’t made them impenetrable to Chinese competition, he said.

Yet there could be positives for non-tech US businesses.

“The potential for businesses to obtain the benefits of AI at a fraction of the cost could be good news for the wider market,” said Mahony.

A slew of Big Tech earnings are due this week, with updates from Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and Tesla. Many have spent huge sums on AI and investors will be assessing when, or if, returns on the investment are likely.