Company suffers biggest stock market loss in history with $600 billion wipeout

It's bad news from Wall Street as a US technology company has just suffered the biggest stock market loss in history.

Yesterday (27 January) may have passed without hitch for most of us, but for followers of global stock markets there was a major shock as tech giant Nvidia reported a $600 billion (£482 billion) wipeout in the space of just one day.

Which is a hell of a lot of money.

Could this our generation's space race? (Costfoto/NurPhoto)

What caused the Nvidia stock losses?

According to Forbes, the company - which is one of the world's most valuable - dropped by 17% following the release of Chinese AI company DeepSeek.

Nvidia are a US-based tech giant who are known for creating and supplying a range of high-powered computing products such as graphics processing units (GPUs), autonomous vehicle technology and, more recently, establishing themselves as the leading supplier of AI software and hardware.

However Nvidia's dominance in the sector was well and truly disrupted by the emergence of DeepSeek.

Who are DeepSeek?

Headquartered in China, DeepSeek are an artificial intelligence company which specialise in the creation of open source large language models (LLM).

Don't know what an LLM is? Neither do I, but according to IBM, they use AI to 'generate text, translate between languages and write many types of content'.

It all sounds very confusing, but thankfully you don't need to be an expert in the complexities of AI in order to realise that DeepSeek's latest release, a free chatbot app, has completely upended the world of AI as we know it.

At the time of writing, DeepSeek currently sits at number one on the Apple Store's most downloaded productivity apps, ahead of ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

DeepSeek has currently overtaken established Chat GPT on the Apple App Store (Getty Stock Images)

The app is also getting a positive response online, with users taking to social media to share their thoughts on the latest AI development.

"I've been using DeepSeek for 20 minutes but I'm pretty sure this is the best thing in AI since the original ChatGPT," one person wrote on X, while a second added: "Deepseek is doing better research for me than paid ChatGPT."

Responding to the rising popularity of DeepSeek, a spokesperson for Nvidia told CNBC: "DeepSeek is an excellent AI advancement and a perfect example of Test Time Scaling.

"DeepSeek’s work illustrates how new models can be created using that technique, leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant."

What is the significance of DeepSeek's newest release?

Now the release of a new AI app may not seem like headline news to you or I, but it has certainly caused a disturbance in the tech world. So much so that President Donald Trump has even weighed in on the matter, calling it a 'wake-up call' for US companies.

"The release of DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company should be a wake-up call for our industries — that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win," he said.

"We have the greatest scientists in the world. Even Chinese leadership told me that .... 'Silicon Valley,' they said, 'there's nobody like those people'."

Will this be our generation's space race? Guess we'll soon find out.