Nvidia’s stock price dropped to $118.50 a share at the end of trading yesterday, January 27—a nearly 17% drop from its opening price of $142.02. This wiped out over $589 billion in market capitalization for the company, which Forbes says is the biggest single-day loss for any company in history. Aside from this, other tech companies also faced losses, with Nasdaq tanking by 3.1%, while other tech giants like Arm, Broadcom, and Oracle all experienced share price drops greater than 10%.
This downward market movement is fueled by the release of DeepSeek R1, an open source LLM that could rival OpenAI’s o1 model in performance while being so optimized that it uses much less power to train. The Chinese AI company said that it took 11x less compute to train its latest model versus Meta’s Llama 3, with its DeepSeek-V3 Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model that has 671 billion parameters being trained of 2,048 Nvidia H800 GPUs in two months—approximately 2.8 million GPU hours. By comparison, Meta’s Llama 3, with its 405 billion parameters, took 54 days to train using 16,384 H100 GPUs, or around 30.8 million GPU hours.
