Jensen Huang, the co-founder of Nvidia Corp., along with the world’s 499 other richest individuals, just lost a combined $108 billion after a selloff in technology stocks, particularly those tied to Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) developer DeepSeek, which also dragged down major stock market indices.
Aside from Huang, who lost 20% of his fortune (approximately $20.1 billion), other billionaires tied to AI saw significant declines. In total, $94 billion in wealth from tech-sector titans, roughly 85% of the total decline in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, just evaporated.
DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based Chinese startup, has been developing AI models since 2023. Western investors only noticed the company recently when its R1 chatbot app topped global download charts. However, due to server outages, the app is now restricting signups to users with Chinese phone numbers.
Another surprising fact is that DeepSeek used only $5.6 million in developing the AI, challenging Silicon Valley’s belief that developing the strongest models requires massive capital and unsettled Western AI investors and companies who have poured significant resources into the industry.
AI hyperscalers like Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft have spent significant amounts on acquiring semiconductors and energy supplies to develop and run AI systems, resulting in substantial wealth gains. A Bloomberg Intelligence report stated that Big Tech firms’ capital spending in 2025 has almost reached $200 billion.
The ability to develop AI with minimal resources is partly due to limited access to GPUs, as the US has imposed stricter export controls on advanced chips. However, Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, suspects that DeepSeek likely possesses around 50,000 H100 GPUs, which they cannot publicly acknowledge due to these export restrictions.
