Nvidia faces a reckoning as Chinese upstart raises questions about Wall Street's darling

NEW YORK (AP) — The superstar run for Nvidia’s stock the last few years has been astonishing. So was its tumble Monday, which caused $595 billion in wealth to vanish. That’s about as much as PepsiCo, McDonalds, Starbucks and Target are worth, combined.

Mostly known only in gaming and crypto circles a few years ago, Nvidia burst into the zeitgeist after seeing its sales surge because customers wanted its chips to train their chatbots and other artificial intelligence products.

Nvidia became a household name as its stock more than tripled in 2023 and then more than doubled in 2024. Investors and analysts lauded CEO Jensen Huang as the “Godfather of AI.” Nvidia grew into a $3 trillion-plus behemoth and traded places with titans like Apple to become the most valuable company on Wall Street.

But that all came to a screeching halt Monday, at least for a moment, after a Chinese upstart called DeepSeek said it had developed a large-language model that could perform like ChatGPT and other U.S. rivals, but by using far less computing power.

Here’s a look at how it all got to this point:

Nvidia’s roots began in gaming.

The Santa Clara, California-based tech company’s invention of the graphics processor unit, or GPU, in 1999 helped spark the growth of the PC gaming market and redefined computer graphics. Now Nvidia’s specialized chips are key components that help power different forms of artificial intelligence, including the latest generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

Huang has dubbed AI “the next industrial revolution,” and Nvidia’s GPUs are designed to perform artificial intelligence tasks faster and more efficiently than general-purpose chips like CPUs. Tech giants are snapping up Nvidia chips as they wade deeper into AI — a movement that’s enabling cars to drive by themselves, and generating stories, art and music.

The demand helped Nvidia's revenue grow by eye-popping levels, quarter after quarter. On Feb. 23, 2023, after Nvidia breezed past analysts' expectations for quarterly profit, Huang said that “AI is at an inflection point, setting up for broad adoption reaching into every industry.” The company's quarterly revenue at the time was $6.05 billion.

That ramped up to $7.19 billion just three months later and then nearly doubled to $13.51 billion three months after that. Revenue has since vaulted to $35.08 billion in the three months through October 2024.

The company's stock price has similarly soared, and its total market value quickly passed rivals like Intel, Microsoft and others. Nvidia alone accounted for more than a fifth of all of the S&P 500 index's total return last year. No other stock came close, and it had more than triple Apple's impact.

Buy an S&P 500 index fund today, and nearly 6 cents out of every $1 will go only into Nvidia. That leaves 94 cents for all the other 499 companies.

Unlike the dot-com boom, real money was behind Nvidia’s surge, and its stock price rose on expectations of ever more to come. Those expectations came into question on Monday.

DeepSeek and its seemingly lower-cost operations raised worries about whether companies would need to spend as many dollars on Nvidia chips as previously thought. The concerns dragged down stocks across the AI industry, including suppliers to the chip industry and the power companies hoping to electrify the vast data centers that were expected to get built to run those chips. But Nvidia was in the spotlight because its stock has become the brightest symbol of the AI bonanza.

Some on Wall Street saw Monday's nearly 17% plunge for Nvidia's stock as an opportunity rather than a signal of pending doom, saying the stock became more affordable. If AI does become cheaper to run, it could open the door to new kinds of customers and software innovations that could ultimately help the industry in the long term.

“As for Nvidia itself, this isn’t the first time a major tech stock has faced existential questions,” said John Belton, portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds. “We’ve seen similar situations with Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Netflix — companies that were once doubted but ultimately rebounded.”

DeepSeek's entrance certainly adds uncertainty to the entire AI ecosystem, but it doesn't change the overwhelming momentum behind the movement, according to Brian Colello, strategist at Morningstar.

“We believe that AI GPU demand still exceeds supply,” he wrote in a report. "So, while slimmer models may enable greater development for the same number of chips, we still think tech firms will continue to buy all the GPUs they can as part of this AI 'gold rush.'"

For its part, Nvidia's stock wobbled between gains and losses early Tuesday following its worst plunge since the 2020 COVID crash, and then rallied a bit and ended the day nearly 9% higher.