Oracle chairman Larry Ellison and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang lost tens of billions on paper as shares of their AI-focused companies suffered as DeepSeek sent a chill through Silicon Valley.

The world’s 500 richest people, led by Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang, lost a combined $US108 billion ($172 billion) on Monday as a tech-led selloff tied to Chinese AI developer DeepSeek sent major indices plunging.

US chip-maker Nvidia led a rout in tech stocks on Monday after the emergence of a low-cost Chinese generative AI model that could threaten US dominance in the fast-growing industry. The chatbot developed by DeepSeek,

Jensen Huang likely had an especially bad case of the Mondays when DeepSeek came to town. Of course, as one of the richest people in the world, the co-founder of Nvidia ended up skating away virtually unscathed.

The recent AI advances by Chinese upstart DeepSeek could be the beginning of a potential nightmare scenario that Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Jensen Huang has been worrying about since the chip maker’s meteoric rise.