NVIDIA's market value evaporated to the largest scale in the history of U.S. stocks, dropping to the third largest in the world, while Apple stands proudly among the "Seven Sisters."

Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek strikes Wall Street, with AI "shovel sellers" NVIDIA's stock price plummeting more than 18% during intraday trading on Monday, marking its largest drop since March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic first broke out and the U.S. stock market experienced a circuit breaker.

As of Monday's close, NVIDIA fell nearly 17%, closing at $118.42, with a single-day market value evaporation of $589 billion, the largest in U.S. stock market history, breaking the previous record. In early September last year, NVIDIA saw a single-day drop of over 9%, with a market value evaporation of $279 billion, which also set the record for the largest single-day market value loss in U.S. stock market history. This time, the market value drop far exceeded the previous record.

Among the top five largest market value evaporation events in U.S. stock market history, four occurred during the period of 2024-2025, all involving NVIDIA, while the other was Meta's earnings disaster in February 2022. In the top ten largest market value evaporation events, eight were also created by NVIDIA during 2024-2025, with the exceptions being the aforementioned Meta and Amazon's event in April 2022.

On Monday, NVIDIA also lost its title as the world's largest company by market value, falling behind Apple and Microsoft to third place.

Due to NVIDIA's significant weight in major indices, its stock price decline had a substantial impact on the entire U.S. stock market. According to Bloomberg data, including this past Monday, eight of the ten trading days with the largest market value losses in the S&P 500 were related to NVIDIA's sharp decline.

On Monday, the Nasdaq fell over 3%, and the S&P 500 dropped nearly 1.5%, with funds rotating into the Dow Jones, which rose 0.65%. NVIDIA's double-leveraged ETF fell nearly 34%. The U.S. semiconductor ETF plummeted over 9.8%, marking the largest single-day drop since March 16, 2020, when it fell over 14%.

The sharp decline in tech stocks led by NVIDIA caused a combined net worth evaporation of $108 billion for the world's top 500 billionaires, including NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, on January 27. Among them, Jensen Huang lost $20.1 billion in one day.

DeepSeek's latest AI model, released last week, is widely regarded as competitive with products from OpenAI and Meta, having reached the top of the Apple App Store rankings. DeepSeek appears to be able to offer performance comparable to that of AI chatbots from major U.S. tech companies at a significantly lower cost. DeepSeek's low-cost AI solution has reignited concerns in the market about the excessive investments made by U.S. tech giants in AI research and development NVIDIA has always been the biggest beneficiary of the AI investment boom, as its designed semiconductors are widely used in AI computing. Although AI-related spending is expected to continue growing, investors may become more cautious and no longer easily favor companies that cannot prove their return on investment.

With NVIDIA's nearly two-year bull market, there are currently very few people in the market willing to short the stock. According to data from S3 Partners, only slightly more than 1% of the available NVIDIA shares are shorted, which has remained basically unchanged compared to early 2024. In contrast, about 12% of the free-floating shares of cryptocurrency concept stock MSTR are shorted.

On the same day, NVIDIA stated that DeepSeek is an outstanding advancement in artificial intelligence (AI), and the inference process, which runs AI models, requires a large number of NVIDIA GPUs and high-performance network support.

On the day when NVIDIA and the Nasdaq faced a black swan event, Apple, which had been declining for several days since the end of last year, became the winner among large tech stocks, reclaiming its position as the world's most valuable company. Apple's stock price rose more than 3% on Monday