World's Wealthiest People Lose $108 Billion Because of Chinese Version of ChatGPT

China's ChatGPT rival crushes US tech stocks

The rise in popularity of a Chinese competitor to ChatGPT has led to a drop in the shares of US tech companies. Nvidia lost its title as "the most valuable company in the world," and its CEO saw his fortune decrease by 20%. Oracle and Dell founders also incurred significant losses.

The collective wealth of the world’s 500 richest people fell by $108 billion on Monday, January 27, due to a slump in tech stocks following the success of the free chatbot DeepSeek-R1 from the Chinese company DeepSeek, Bloomberg reports.

The most significant losses were suffered by Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of US chipmaker Nvidia, whose fortune shrank by 20%, or $20.1 billion. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, his net worth now stands at $101 billion. Nvidia’s market value dropped by $600 billion, relinquishing its title as the "most valuable company in the world" to Apple and Microsoft. Its shares plunged nearly 18%.

Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison lost more in absolute terms – $22.6 billion – but this represented only 12% of his total fortune, Bloomberg noted. Dell founder Michael Dell saw a $13 billion drop in his net worth, while Binance founder Changpeng Zhao lost $12.1 billion.

The NASDAQ Composite index fell 3.1%, while the S&P 500 declined by 1.5%.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke about the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek-R1:  

"DeepSeek-R1 is an impressive model, especially considering what they [the developers] have achieved at such a price. Of course, we’ll release much better models, but the emergence of a new competitor is truly inspiring!"

Details

DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company that develops open-source large language models (LLM). Based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, it is owned and solely funded by Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer, whose co-founder, Liang Wenfeng, established the company in 2023 and serves as its CEO. DeepSeek performs tasks at the same level as ChatGPT, despite being developed at a magnitude lower cost and utilizing fewer resources. The AI model was developed by DeepSeek amidst U.S. sanctions on China for Nvidia chips, which were intended to restrict the country's ability to develop advanced AI systems. On 10 January 2025, the company released its first free chatbot app, which by 27 January had surpassed ChatGPT as the most-downloaded free app on the iOS App Store in the United States, and caused Nvidia's share price to drop by 18%. DeepSeek's success against larger and more established rivals has been described as "upending AI" and constituting "the first shot at what is emerging as a global AI space race". DeepSeek has made its generative artificial intelligence chatbot open source, meaning its code is freely available for use, modification, and viewing; this includes permission to access and utilize the source code and design documents for building purposes. The company rigorously recruits young AI researchers from top Chinese universities, and hires from outside the computer science field to diversify its models' knowledge and abilities.

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Author`s name Pavel Morozov
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Editor Dmitry Sudakov
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