The 500 richest people in the world, led by its co -founder NvidiaJensen Huang, lost a total of $ 108 billion on Monday, as the technological sell-off because of the Chinese artificial intelligence development company Deepseek led to a major fall in markets.

According to Bloomberg agency, billionaires whose fortunes are linked to artificial intelligence were the biggest losers of the sell-off: Huang saw his property fall by $ 20.1 billion, ie 20%, while loss The $ 22.6 billion of Oracle Larry Ellison’s co -founder was greater in absolute terms, but represented only 12% of his property, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Dell’s Michael Dell lost $ 13 billion and Binance co -founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao lost $ 12.1 billion.

The Titans of the Technology industry as a group saw $ 94 billion disappear – about 85% of the overall drop in the Bloomberg index. The NASDAQ stock market fell 3.1% on Monday and the S&P 500 by 1.5%.

DEEPSEEK -based Hangtzu has been developing artificial intelligence models since 2023, but the company first entered the radar of many Western investors this weekend, as the free Deepseek R1 Chatbot app was at the top of shootings worldwide. The new users were so many that Deepseek found it difficult to keep the application in operation, resulting in a holiday and forced to limit registration to Chinese phone numbers.

Deepseek’s entry into the struggle of artificial intelligence, which costs just $ 5.6 million, is a challenge for Silicon Valley’s narrative that huge capital expenditure is essential for the development of the strongest models. This has caused a serious blow to billionaires whose fortunes are linked to the Western Artificial Intelligence Supply chain, which has been the largest driving lever in the stock market in the last two years.

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The ejecting of the valuations of the so -called artificial intelligence giants – including Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft – has created billions of wealth for their owners since Openai presented Chatgpt in November 2022. Based on a similar manual: They spend huge amounts on the development and operation of artificial intelligence systems, gathering top semiconductors and the energy supplies required for their operation.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Friday that the company plans to spend $ 60 to $ 65 billion on artificial intelligence projects this year, well above Wall Street estimates. Expenditure on all Big Tech companies will reach $ 200 billion in 2025, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence report.

Despite the limited revenue of all their investments so far, markets have rewarded US technological shares with record valuations, which in turn have created historical profits for their owners. Nvidia has been distinguished as the biggest single winner of the artificial intelligence explosion so far, with Huang’s net fortune increasing almost eight times to $ 121 billion from the beginning of 2023 to Friday. Zuckerberg’s fortune jumped by $ 385% to $ 229 billion in the same period, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos won 133% at $ 254 billion.

While Huang and Ellison suffered losses, the wealth of other large billionaires in technology were left untouched. Zuckerberg’s net fortune closed on the day, earning $ 4.3 billion, as Meta recovered from its fall at the beginning of the meeting. Bezos’ fortune climbed by about $ 632 million.

Deepseek

The fact that Deepseek was able to develop a free model that potentially competes or overcomes competitors, such as Anthropic’s Chatgpt and Claude, in a fraction of growth costs investors to question Silicon Valley’s costs.

One main reason why Deepseek was not based on large investments and top chips to develop its model is that Chinese companies had limited access to strong GPUs or graphics processing units based on most Western companies since the government is based on The US has established strict export controls on the most advanced chips.

In an interview with CNBC last week, Alexandr Wang, chief executive of the Scale AI educational data provider, said that, despite export checks, Deepseek and other Chinese developers have probably more GPUs than Silicon Valley believes.