DeepSeek Story Is Bad News For Nvidia And The Microchip Makers. It May Be Worse For These Stocks
Nuclear plays have surged over the last month and last year on AI hopes that may not come to fruition.It feels like this day was always going to come - when all the artificial-intelligence names collapse - but one might have imagined it would come from, say, a profit warning from Nvidia. Instead, it comes from what appears to be an Nvidia consumer, Chinese AI service provider DeepSeek.It works well, jumping to number-one in Apple's U.S. App store, but the issue is less the performance and more the training behind it. There are differing claims as to the number of Nvidia chips used by the company - 10,000 or 50,000, the latter roughly the size of the cluster on which OpenAI is training GPT-5 - but what is rocking markets is how cheap it was. DeepSeek's own research paper puts the training costs of one of its models at less than $6 million.