Nvidia Sheds Almost $600B in Market Cap, Biggest One-Day Loss in U.S. History...

by Samantha Subin at CNBC

Key Points

Nvidia shares plunged 17% on Monday, resulting in a market cap loss of close to $600 billion, the biggest drop ever for a U.S. company.
The sell-off, which hit much of the U.S. tech sector, was sparked by concerns about increased competition from Chinese AI lab DeepSeek.
Data center companies that rely on Nvidia chips also plummeted, with Dell, Oracle and Super Micro Computer all falling by at least 8.7%.

Nvidia lost close to $600 billion in market cap on Monday, the biggest drop for any company on a single day in U.S. history.

The chipmaker’s stock price plummeted 17% to close at $118.58. It was Nvidia’s worst day on the market since March 16, 2020, which was early in the Covid pandemic. After Nvidia surpassed Apple last week to become the most valuable publicly traded company, the stock’s drop Monday led a 3.1% slide in the tech-heavy Nasdaq.

The sell-off was sparked by concerns that Chinese artificial intelligence lab DeepSeek is presenting increased competition in the global AI battle. In late December, DeepSeek unveiled a free, open-source large language model that it said took only two months and less than $6 million to build, using reduced-capability chips from Nvidia called H800s.

Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, dominate the market for AI data center chips in the U.S., with tech giants such as Alphabet, Meta and Amazon spending billions of dollars on the processors to train and run their AI models.

Analysts at Cantor wrote in a report Monday that the release of DeepSeek’s…