Shares of chipmaker Nvidia plunged Monday, for its worst day since the global market sell-off in March 2020 triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.

US tech giant Nvidia lost over a sixth of its value after the surging popularity of a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) app spooked investors in the US and Europe. DeepSeek, a Chinese AI chatbot reportedly made at a fraction of the cost of its rivals, launched last week but has already become the the most downloaded free app in the US.

DeepSeek's new AI model has sparked concerns about Nvidia's dominance in the AI hardware market, causing a drop in the chipmaker's stock and raising questions about the future of high-performance AI chips.

Nvidia, which soared to the top of the stock market by selling the computer chips fueling the world’s artificial intelligence boom, has been dealt a tough reality check by a small Chinese company that showed it could do more

A chatbot made by Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has rocketed to the top of Apple’s App Store charts in the US this week, dethroning OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app.