Jen-Hsun Huang's net worth dropped by a reported $20,800,000,000 after DeepSeek fears shook the AI market to its core earlier this week
China-based AI startup DeepSeek caused the tech market to wobble earlier this week, as the release of its open-source R1 model led to mass sell-offs in tech shares. It seems Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang may have taken a personal hit from the fallout, equating to a $20.8 billion loss to his net worth.
Nvidia was the worst hit by the market tumble, losing 17% of its stock value, equivalent to $600 million of its overall valuation. Forbes reports that Huang's personal fortune dropped with it, sliding from $124.4 billion to $103.7 billion and dropping him from the 10th spot on its real-time billionaires list to 17th.
However, Nvidia's share price appears to have stabilised since then, and Huang's personal net worth along with it—as at the time of writing he sits 13th on the list with an estimated $108.9 billion. It's also worth pointing out that this isn't necessarily money in Huang's pockets that he has 'lost', this is all theoretical monies calculated from his stock holdings, etc.
Still, that's a substantial drop overall, however theoretical, and one that was directly caused by the release of DeepSeek's R1 model, which quickly revealed itself to be a rival to similar models released by OpenAI and Meta—but allegedly trained for a fraction of the cost.
Nvidia's meteoric rise prior to R1's release has been primarily attributed to huge sales of its AI accelerator hardware. The notion that an open source, Chinese-developed model could be developed to provide comparable results for significantly less cost spooked investors, and the AI market suffered major financial losses as a result.
It's also been reported, from unconfirmed sources, that Huang will today visit US president Donald Trump. While the visit does not appear to be officially scheduled, if it does go ahead then the topic of US-based AI development versus China's recent inroads seems likely to be under discussion.
Or it could just be a chance to catch up over coffee and cookies. Who am I to speculate?
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