The global technology sector suffered a major shock on January 27, when the combined wealth of the planet's 500 richest people fell by 108 billion USD. According to Bloomberg, the reason was the unexpected success of the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek-R1, which has become a serious competitor to Western artificial intelligence technologies, writes RBC.RU.

The leaders of the technology industry suffered the most significant damage. Jensen Huang, the head of Nvidia, lost 20,1 billion USD, which was 20% of his wealth, now valued at 101 billion USD. Nvidia has lost its status as the world's most valuable company after its market value fell by 600 billion USD, losing leadership to Apple and Microsoft.

The wave of sales has also affected other technology giants: the fortune of Larry Ellison from Oracle Corp. decreased by 22,6 billion USD, Michael Dell lost 13 billion USD, and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao lost 12,1 billion USD. Stock indices also showed a significant decline: the NASDAQ Composite fell 3,1% and the S&P 500 fell 1,5%.

It is noteworthy that the Chinese startup DeepSeek achieved impressive results at lower costs: only 2 thousand chips were required to train their AI model, while American competitors used 16 thousand. After DeepSeek-R1 topped the list of free apps in the US App Store, the company suffered a large-scale cyber attack, which led to a temporary restriction on new user registration.

The European market also reacted to the situation: shares of Siemens, a supplier of equipment for AI infrastructure, fell by almost 20%.