A jolt of panic hit big technology stocks on Monday, with investors rattled by fears that advances in artificial intelligence by Chinese upstarts could threaten the moneymaking power of tech giants in the United States, Europe and beyond. The chipmaker Nvidia was one of the hardest hit, falling about 13 percent in early trading, a move that erased hundreds of billions of dollars in market value. The Chinese A.I. company DeepSeek has made waves by matching the abilities of cutting-edge chatbots while using a fraction of the specialized computer chips that leading A.I. companies rely on. That has prompted investors to rethink the large returns they are expecting on the heady valuations of companies like Nvidia, whose equipment powers the most advanced A.I. systems, as well as the enormous investments that companies like Google, Meta and OpenAI are making to build their A.I. businesses. U.S. markets tumbled at the open, with the S&P 500 slumping more than 2 percent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropping 3.5 percent. Tech stocks also dented markets in Europe and Japan. The pain was concentrated at companies at the forefront of the A.I. boom, including the multitrillion-dollar behemoths that drove the largest back-to-back annual gains for U.S. markets since the 1990s. Investors have fretted about whether the rally has gone too far, leaving little room for error at the small group of tech firms that now dominates the market.

Full report : Artificial Intelligence companies and Chip Makers stocks fall as China’s DeepSeek sparks U.S. worries about the AI race,