Trump’s Favored Tech Titans See Billions Wiped Out in AI Market Sell-Off [Video]

A week after some of America’s wealthiest tech billionaires attended Donald Trump‘s inauguration, their personal fortunes took a major hit. On Monday, a small Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup called DeepSeek singlehandedly wiped billions off the valuations of U.S. tech giants like Nvidia, Broadcom and Microsoft.

Why It Matters

The selloff in U.S. tech stocks on Monday was immediate and brutal, stemming from concerns that DeepSeek, and thus China, has caught up with American companies at the forefront of generative AI—at a fraction of the cost.

Last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei revealed in a podcast that training some AI models could cost as much as $1 billion. DeepSeek reportedly built its LLM (large-language model) for less than $6 million, whereas OpenAIwas said to have spent something in the range of $100 million to develop GPT-4. DeepSeek surpassed ChatGPT on the app stores to become the most downloaded app in the …