Shares of chipmaker Nvidia plunged Monday, for its worst day since the global market sell-off in March 2020 triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.
The plunge came amid a global tech stock sell-off over fears about America's leadership in the AI sector. Those fears were largely sparked by advances claimed by a Chinese artificial intelligence startup.
Shares of the chipmaker, one of the primary beneficiaries of the artificial intelligence boom in tech stocks, plummeted as much as 18%. That pushed Nvidia's market value below $3 trillion. Still, shares of the firm are up more than 480% over the last two years.
The drop accounted for nearly $600 billion in lost market value though. It is the biggest market value drop in U.S. stock market history, according to Bloomberg. And nearly double the second worst drop in history, also seen by Nvidia shareholders in September 2024, when the company shed $279 billion in value.
For some perspective, the amount of market value lost by Nvidia on Monday is more than the entire market value of Exxon Mobil, Costco, Home Depot or Bank of America.
Nvidia said in a statement Monday that advances by DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company whose latest large language model has taken Silicon Valley by storm, were an example of what is possible, “leveraging widely available models and compute that is fully export control compliant.”
The company added that the surge in interest in DeepSeek, which topped the Apple app store on Monday, could create more demand for its graphics processing units, or GPUs.
“Inference requires significant numbers of NVIDIA GPUs and high-performance networking,” it said.
Due to the AI-fueled surge in mega-cap tech stocks, Nvidia catapulted into the top five most valuable companies in the world in 2023. The surge didn't stop there, with the company soaring past Alphabet, Microsoft and the most valuable company in the world: Apple. At its most recent peak, Nvidia reached a towering $3.7 trillion.
With Monday's losses, Apple has retaken the title of world's most valuable company and Nvidia's value sank to around $2.9 trillion.
Nvidia's drop was also a drag on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which finished the day higher but began the day in the red. Nvidia joined the prestigious 30-stock index in November, replacing rival chipmaker Intel. The Nasdaq Composite, which more closely tracks publicly traded tech companies, slid around 3%.
The global sell-off in tech stocks also meant the S&P Technology sector fell into the red for the year so far, the only sector lower over that time.
