Those doubts were reinforced with the late-January launch of new low-cost models from Chinese startup DeepSeek, which optimize computational efficiency by relying more heavily on inference than most incumbent models.
In a DeepSeek-induced global rout in AI stocks, Nvidia shares lost as much as a fifth of their value at one point. They subsequently regained most of that ground, with investors wagering the company's chips will remain the industry standard for training and inference, although they have dropped again on broader trade concerns.