For a slew of AI chip companies chomping to dethrone Nvidia, DeepSeek is the opening they’ve been waiting for.

DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based startup founded in 2023, shot to the top of Apple’s App Store free app chart after releasing a new open-source AI model it says rivals OpenAI's work. Its website was hit by outages amid a spike in interest.

US officials are probing whether Chinese AI startup DeepSeek bought advanced Nvidia Corp. semiconductors through third parties in Singapore, circumventing US restrictions on sales of chips used for artificial intelligence tasks,

When OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, companies started spending billions on GPUs to train AI models. Nvidia led the market for graphics processing units (GPUs), so it was the right company at the right time to deliver monster returns to investors.

Banríon Capital Management Founder and CEO Shana Orczyk Sissel said that any pullback in shares of Nvidia - like the one sparked this week by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek - is a buying opportunity for investors.

China’s DeepSeek says it trained an AI model for less than $6 million. This is as big U.S. tech companies have poured billions of dollars into AI chips and systems for their projects.

DeepSeek stunned the tech world with the release of its R1 "reasoning" model, matching or exceeding OpenAI's reasoning model for a fraction of the cost.