Chinese Deepseek AI Soars – NVIDIA, OpenAI under threat?

• Deepseek has sent shock waves to the stock market, with Nvidia shares dropping by 4.62%.
• AI-themed crypto assets are mostly hit with the market crash, dipping with double digits.

Over the past day, global stock markets have experienced a sharp decline as Chinese AI startup DeepSeek shook the tech industry.

In the last 24 hours, Deepseek surged to become the most popular AI in the U.S. This sudden spike has sent shockwaves throughout the country’s stock futures.

According to a report, China’s Deepseek released a large language model (LLM) in December 2024 which performs the same as OpenAI and other AI systems despite the continued restrictions by the U.S. on chip imports.

Five days ago, it revealed another LLM trained at a fraction of the cost of other AI systems from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other major companies.

This affordability has made it very popular, positioning itself as a top competitor to OpenAI and Nvidia.

Source: Market Watch

As such, Nasdaq contracts and Japanese chipmaker stocks have experienced massive selling. Thus, the NASDAQ composite index was down by 99.38%, Dow Jones global went down by 140.82%, and S&P 500 fell by 17.47%.

Over the same period, the Chinese tech shares have surged to historical levels as market investors turn to Deepseek after its rapid rise.

This has caused concerns over the continued dominance of U.S. AI companies, resulting in a market sell-off as investors panic.

AI coins crushed as Nvidia stock declines

While DeepSeek and Chinese tech stock have surged, Nvidia has faced a strong dip over the past day. In fact, as of this writing, Nvidia’s stock was trading at 142.62.

This marked a 4.62% decline over the past day.

Source: Market Screener

This decline arises as rumors claim that Chinese quant fund high-flyer has access to 50,000 of Nvidia’s H100 AI GPUs, which are from the last generation of AI chips.

Notably, such a shock market dump has negatively affected AI-themed Cryptocurrencies. Accordingly, all AI coins have seen one of the largest dips of 2025.

Firstly, AI coins such as Render[RNDR] which is closely aligned with Nvidia has dropped by 15.72%. Other coins have also dropped.

For instance, Injective [INJ] has dropped by 9.82%, Artificial superintelligence Alliance [FET] has declined by 11.65%, Filecoin [FIL] by 11.09%.

Near Protocol [NEAR] dipped by 12.54%, and Internet computer [ICP] decreased by 10.75% as well.

Source: CoinMarketCap

This crash in AI coins is not an isolated case, as the crash in the U.S. stock market has affected the whole crypto market. As such, major cryptos such as Bitcoin [BTC] dipped to a low of $98k.

What next for AI coins?

Notably, the dip in AI coins, once again bring to light the existing close correlation between cryptocurrency and traditional finance.

Until these coins decouple from the stock market and other AI giants, their performance will continue to be affected by stock market performance.