Despite the negative financial impact, Nvidia praised DeepSeek’s breakthrough. “DeepSeek is an excellent A.I. advancement and a perfect example of test time scaling,” a company spokesperson told Observer in a statement.

The market reaction proved particularly severe for Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), with shares plummeting and erasing half a trillion in market cap at the time of this writing. To put this staggering figure in perspective,

DeepSeek topped the Apple App Store chart and sparked fears the Chinese company was quickly catching up with OpenAI's ChatGPT while costing far less.

The U.S. tried to slow China’s advances, but the startup showed how hard that is.

The emergence of the DeepSeek chatbot has sent Silicon Valley into a frenzy, with calls to go faster on advancing artificial intelligence and beat communist-led China before it is too late. "China’s innovation with DeepSeek is jarring,