Nvidia CEO Huang Loses $20 Billion

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

Quick Read

  • Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang lost $20 billion in net worth in one day.

  • If Chinese DeepSeek AI software is as good as claimed, his net worth will drop further.

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Nvidia CEO Huang Loses $20 Billion

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A lot of people and institutions lost a lot of money as Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) shed $590 billion in market cap when the tech world realized how good the new Chinese DeepSeek artificial intelligence (AI) software is. The biggest loser by far was Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who lost $20 billion in net worth in one day.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Huang is still the 15th richest man in the world. His net worth is $101 billion.

Huang has built Nvidia from primarily a gaming chip company that made graphics processors to an AI colossus. In its most recent quarter, Nvidia reported revenue of $35.7 billion, up 94% from the same period the year before. Per-share earnings rose 111% to $0.78. The company said its revenue would be approximately $37.5 billion in the upcoming quarterly report. Investors are not so worried about whether Nvidia will hit that number. The question is, in the face of what could be an AI world that needs less processing power, can Nvidia revenue continue to grow in high double digits?

The DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1 AI models may be as powerful as OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT release. The latest OpenAI release is considered the industry standard. (Some experts would argue that Google’s Gemini and products from Elon Musk’s xAI belong in that conversation.)

The staggering claim about DeepSeek is that it cost less than $6 million to train the V3 model. It cost OpenAI over $100 million to train the latest model of ChatGPT.

The issue for Nvidia is whether AI will need huge computing power in the future. The DeepSeek product would indicate the answer is no. A total of $6 million is not enough to cover the cost of Nvidia chips needed to create DeepSeek’s release. This low DeepSeek investment could be the driver for other advances in AI applications. Cheaper hardware solutions undercut demand for expensive Nvidia processors.

Given the amount of testing that experts will do of DeepSeek’s claims, it will not take long to confirm them. Every major AI company in the world is analyzing facts about the Chinese AI product. If their claim about the costs to create DeepSeek’s product is true, Huang’s net worth will fall further.

Prediction: Meta Platforms Will Be Worth More Than Nvidia in 2028

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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