Several notable billionaires experienced massive hits to their fortunes Monday as the Chinese generative artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek upended the U.S. stock market, hitting the American AI leader Nvidia the hardest.

The world’s 500 richest people, led by Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang, lost a combined $US108 billion ($172 billion) on Monday as a tech-led selloff tied to Chinese AI developer DeepSeek sent major indices plunging.

US chip-maker Nvidia led a rout in tech stocks on Monday after the emergence of a low-cost Chinese generative AI model that could threaten US dominance in the fast-growing industry. The chatbot developed by DeepSeek,

The recent AI advances by Chinese upstart DeepSeek could be the beginning of a potential nightmare scenario that Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Jensen Huang has been worrying about since the chip maker’s meteoric rise.