$108 billion per day: how DeepSeek's success brought down the fortunes of billionaires

The fortune of the 500 richest people in the world decreased by $108 billion in one day due to the sale of shares in the technology sector caused by the success of the Chinese company DeepSeek. The NASDAQ Composite and S&P 500 indexes fell by 3.1% and 1.5%, respectively.

The biggest losses were incurred by Jensen Huang, the founder of Nvidia, whose fortune decreased by 20%, or $20.1 billion, after the company's shares fell by 17%. Oracle's Larry Ellison lost $22.6 billion, Michael Dell lost $13 billion, and Changpeng Zhao of Binance lost $12.1 billion. In general, representatives of the technology sector recorded losses of $94 billion, which accounted for 85% of the overall decline in the index.

Hangzhou-based DeepSeek has released the DeepSeek R1 chatbot, which topped the global download charts. The company was able to create a free AI model, comparable in quality to ChatGPT and Claude, but at a lower cost. This has called into question Silicon Valley's approach based on large investments.

Chinese companies, including DeepSeek, are doing without advanced GPUs due to limited access to them caused by US export sanctions. Nevertheless, they probably have more such resources than expected, as noted by Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang.