Despite the negative financial impact, Nvidia praised DeepSeek’s breakthrough. “DeepSeek is an excellent A.I. advancement and a perfect example of test time scaling,” a company spokesperson told Observer in a statement.

The market reaction proved particularly severe for Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), with shares plummeting and erasing half a trillion in market cap at the time of this writing. To put this staggering figure in perspective,

Short sellers of artificial intelligence-related stocks raked in bumper profits after the smashing debut of low-cost AI models from China's DeepSeek spooked Wall Street, with bets against Nvidia yielding record profits totaling more than $6 billion.