Jen-Hsun Huang’s net worth dropped by a reported $20,800,000,000 after DeepSeek fears shook the AI market to its core earlier this week

2025-01-31 10:27:00
www.pcgamer.com

China-based AI startup DeepSeek caused the tech market to wobble earlier this week, as the release of its open-source R1 model led to mass sell-offs in tech shares. It seems Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang may have taken a personal hit from the fallout, equating to a $20.8 billion loss to his net worth.

Nvidia was the worst hit by the market tumble, losing 17% of its stock value, equivalent to $600 million of its overall valuation. Forbes reports that Huang’s personal fortune dropped with it, sliding from $124.4 billion to $103.7 billion and dropping him from the 10th spot on its real-time billionaires list to 17th.

However, Nvidia’s share price appears to have stabilised since then, and Huang’s personal net worth along with it—as at the time of writing he sits 13th on the list with an estimated $108.9 billion. It’s also worth pointing out that this isn’t necessarily money in Huang’s pockets that he has ‘lost’, this is all theoretical monies calculated from his stock holdings, etc.

Still, that’s a substantial drop overall, however theoretical, and one that was directly caused by the release of DeepSeek’s R1 model, which quickly revealed itself to be a rival to similar models released by OpenAI and Meta—but allegedly trained for a fraction of the cost.

Nvidia’s meteoric rise prior to R1’s release has been primarily attributed to huge sales of its AI accelerator hardware. The notion that an open source, Chinese-developed model could be developed to provide comparable results for significantly less cost spooked investors, and the AI market suffered major financial losses as a result.

It’s also been reported, from unconfirmed sources, that Huang will today visit US president Donald Trump. While the visit does not appear to be officially scheduled, if it does go ahead then the topic of US-based AI development versus China’s recent inroads seems likely to be under discussion.

Or it could just be a chance to catch up over coffee and cookies. Who am I to speculate?

Ah, go on then. If I was to imagine what these two might talk about left in a room alone, I would think some discussion of Trump’s recent threats of 100% tariffs on chips from Taiwan might be on the table. Nvidia, like many other major tech companies, is currently highly dependent on Taiwan-based TSMC’s advanced silicon, not least as the basis for its RTX 50-series GPUs.

Never mind Blackwell AI GPUs, which are also primarily manufactured by TSMC. A 100% tariff rate would have far-reaching repercussions for any modern tech company, and I’d be willing to bet Jen-Hsun might have some ideas about how it could be done differently.

I would also expect there might be some questions as to the provenance of the GPU silicon that DeepSeek’s models have been trained with, especially given questions the US government apparently has over whether they were restricted chips or not.

Again, though, that’s just me pulling ideas from a hat. Perhaps Trump has taken up PC gaming, and is interested in getting hold of an RTX 5090?

Regardless, it looks like Monday’s market tumble may have substantially dented Huang’s theoretical finances. Still, with many billions left in the bank, and his company still worth an estimated $3.04 trillion at time of writing, it looks like Nvidia are far from down for the count.

Do you reckon Trump’s seen the DLSS 4 announcement demo yet? Even I was impressed. Perhaps they’re sitting in the Oval Office right now, scrolling through the highlights. Oh, to be a fly on the wall.

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