Speaker 1: Shares in the advanced computer chip maker NVIDIA plunged overnight after investors became concerned by a cheap Chinese artificial intelligence program called DeepSeek. Let's go live to our business reporter, Ed Boyd. Ed, this had a massive reaction. Twelve hours ago, NVIDIA was America's most valuable company.

Speaker 2: Twelve hours ago, NVIDIA was the most valuable company on America's stock market. But then, in some furious trading overnight on the NASDAQ index, its value plunged of almost 17 percent. About one trillion Aussie dollars was wiped off the value of NVIDIA, or $600 billion US. And just for context, BHP is worth $200 billion Aussie dollars. So it's the equivalent of five BHPs just wiped out in a couple of hours of trading on the NASDAQ exchange. It's all due to this new Chinese AI chatbot called DeepSeek, which was kicked off on the 10th of January. And it's now gone through a couple of different phases and is becoming very popular in America. The critical fact is that DeepSeek claim that they've spent about $5.6 million US on these advanced computer chips, which is a fraction of the cost of what the likes of its big competitors in America, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, have spent. They've reportedly spent up to billions of dollars on these powerful computer chips to create these AI chat models. So DeepSeek is doing it at a fraction of the cost, and it caused investors to really sell off NVIDIA sharply last night. Let's just show you some of the share prices. You can see NVIDIA was down almost 17 percent, so about a trillion Aussie dollars wiped off its value. Go to the next page. We can see some of the other big tech stocks in America that were affected as well. Oracle down almost 14 percent. Alphabet, which is the big parent company that owns Google, down about 4 percent. Meta did lift about 2 percent yesterday, but it was a big sell-off for US shares. We go to the next page. We can just look more generally at the markets. You can see the NASDAQ index, which is America's big technology index, well, that shed 3 percent and the NASDAQ is now down 5 percent this year. So investors clearly concerned about DeepSeek and what it can do for reportedly here in a fraction of the cost of what its competitors in America can do with the same products.

Speaker 1: Ed, the tech billionaire Elon Musk, though, he's accusing DeepSeek of lying about its prowess.

Speaker 2: Yeah, one of the facts from DeepSeek is they claim that they've only got about 2050 of these highly powerful artificial intelligence chips from NVIDIA. Remember, the US government has put in restrictions on exporting these chips to China. So DeepSeek claim they only have 2048 of these computer chips. Elon Musk claims that the number is actually much higher. There's a tweet that he did just overnight. This is in response to an interview where the man you can see the photo of claims that DeepSeek actually have 50,000 of these computer chips as opposed to 2050. So this man claims they've got 50,000 chips. Elon Musk says, obviously, they do. DeepSeek is so popular. So it is the number one downloaded app right now on the App Store in the US. And it's caused the website to basically crash. The company put out this statement about an hour ago, saying due to large scale malicious attacks, we're temporarily limiting registrations to ensure continued service. So DeepSeek is so popular, people are signing up to it in massive numbers. But Elon Musk is basically trying to downplay DeepSeek's effectiveness, because if they were using 50,000 of these computer chips to to make this chatbot, then it would wouldn't have really caused this big stock market reaction. The stock market reaction is due to the fact that DeepSeek claim they only have 2,000 of these computer chips to do something that other big chatbot companies are doing as well. Here's the stock market result this morning, Kieran. It's only up nine points in early trade. Hasn't been a big market reaction to us in Australia. We're not as heavily affected by the tech sell offs, obviously, that we've seen on Wall Street overnight. But DeepSeek, this is clearly something to watch, see how it performs over the next few months.

Speaker 1: Ed, thank you, appreciate that.