New York (dpa) - A chatbot from China shocks Wall Street: Panicked investors have caused the stock market value of chip company Nvidia to plummet by almost 600 billion dollars in one day.

This was triggered by the realization that artificial intelligence software can potentially be trained with much less computing power - and therefore also chips from Nvidia - than previously thought. The Chinese start-up DeepSeek claims to have trained its new AI model at a cost of less than six million dollars and on a few slimmed-down Nvidia chip systems.

Cold feet on Wall Street

Whether all this is exactly true is not known. There was speculation in the industry weeks ago that DeepSeek might have access to more Nvidia chips than it admits in view of the US export restrictions. However, investors who have been driving Nvidia's shares higher and higher in recent months in anticipation of a future mega deal got cold feet on Monday. US President Donald Trump spoke of a wake-up call for American companies - and at the same time found it "positive" that AI could be cheaper.

Nvidia shares fell by almost 17%, erasing 589 billion dollars in market capitalization. Never before had a US company lost so much value in one day - although none before it was as expensive as Nvidia with almost 3.5 trillion dollars.

What can the USA do with better chips?

But what does all this mean for the future? American companies have recently outdone themselves with announcements about how much money they want to invest in AI infrastructure. ChatGPT inventor OpenAI and several partners alone promised to invest 500 billion dollars in data centers in the coming years. At Facebook group Meta, founder Mark Zuckerberg promised 60 billion dollars this year alone. But is DeepSeek now showing that it can manage with significantly less computing power?

US experts would rather see it the other way around. The question is not whether DeepSeek can overtake current market leaders in the USA, emphasized X. Eyeé from the AI consulting firm Malo Santo. It is much more about how quickly the Chinese company's research approaches can be implemented. "If DeepSeek can develop this with old hardware, what can we do with newer hardware?" she asked on US broadcaster CNBC.

Doubts about the costs of DeepSeek

The tech industry will still "need a lot of chips", industry analyst Stacy Rasgon was also convinced. "It's clearly a panic today," he emphasized with regard to the stock market reaction. At the same time, Rasgon questioned the data from China: "They didn't train the model for five million dollars, that didn't happen."

Last week, the head of AI company Scale AI, Alexander Wang, said that according to his information, DeepSeek had access to 50,000 H100 chip systems from Nvidia, but could not talk about them due to US export restrictions. The US government only allows Nvidia to sell chips to China that are less powerful.

Who is behind DeepSeek?

The company was founded in 2023 by hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng - and is said to have secured a package of Nvidia chips. DeepSeek relies on open source models where the source code is publicly available. The data is stored on servers in China. Information that the Chinese government does not like, such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, is concealed by the chatbot. The fact that DeepSeek rose to number one in the US app store for the iPhone is therefore particularly ironic in view of the crackdown on Tiktok.

Not only Nvidia affected

The DeepSeek shock also affected other shares. The shares of chip company Broadcom also lost around 17%. Energy companies, where investors had been speculating for months on good business in the supply of data centers, were hit even harder. Shares in Constellation Energy fell by a good fifth, while the price of Vistra plummeted by as much as 28 percent. Shares in Apple and the Facebook group Meta, on the other hand, rose on the prospect of cheaper AI.