With a cost of $0 for this AI tech, the reasoning goes, there’s no reason to spend billions on AI from companies like OpenAI or others whose stocks soared on the tech last year. Those include Alphabet, Microsoft and NVIDIA, all of which tanked on Monday, with NVIDIA, maker of the chips that underpin AI, falling 17%.

Investors rushed to capitalise on the DeepSeek chaos in January, as North American equity funds enjoyed their largest one-day inflows immediately after billions were wiped off the US market.

In late January, DeepSeek claimed that it built its own foundation model for less than $6 million. The response from investors to this news was brutal and swift. The price of Nvidia (NVDA) stock plunged 17% on January 27,