DeepSeek 颠覆科技与华尔街的那一天

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Updated Jan. 28, 2025 12:19 am ET
更新于 2025 年 1 月 28 日 12:19 am ET

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President Donald Trump said the launch of a low-cost Chinese AI model should be seen as a wake up call for U.S. industries. Trump also announced plans to impose new tariffs on semiconductor imports. Photo: elizabeth frantz/Reuters
美国总统唐纳德·特朗普表示，低成本中国人工智能模型的推出应被视为对美国产业的警钟。特朗普还宣布计划对半导体进口征收新关税。照片：elizabeth frantz/Reuters

For two years, markets’ belief that the rise of artificial intelligence would usher in a new era of productivity growth has fueled trillions of dollars in stock-market gains.
两年来，市场对人工智能崛起将开启生产力增长新时代的信念，推动了数万亿美元的股市收益。

Nvidia NVDA -16.97%decrease; red down pointing triangle, the maker of the computer chips at the heart of the AI boom, has been in the vanguard of this advance. Wall Street has perceived the company to have an almost unbreachable defense against competition with its offerings of high-tech chips. The company’s rapid growth and windfall profit have helped push other technology firms and the Nasdaq Composite Index to record after record, with giddy investors expecting more of the same down the road.
英伟达（Nvidia，NVDA-16.97%）作为人工智能热潮核心的计算机芯片制造商，一直处于这一进步的前沿。华尔街认为，该公司凭借其高科技芯片产品，几乎拥有不可逾越的竞争壁垒。该公司的快速增长和意外利润推动其他科技公司和纳斯达克综合指数屡创新高，投资者们对未来抱有更多期待。

On Monday, the mood turned sour. DeepSeek, a dark-horse power in artificial intelligence, emerged from China. That rattled big tech stocks, led by a plunge of almost $600 billion in Nvidia, which only last week was the world’s most valuable company. Nvidia’s fall marked the largest one-day loss in market value for any public company.
周一，市场情绪急转直下。人工智能领域的黑马力量 DeepSeek 自中国崛起，引发科技巨头股票动荡，其中英伟达市值暴跌近 6000 亿美元，而就在上周，它还是全球市值最高的公司。英伟达的下跌创下了上市公司单日市值损失的最高纪录。

Last week DeepSeek released an AI model that appeared to perform on par with a cutting-edge counterpart from OpenAI, the U.S. firm at the heart of the AI craze. The twist: Creative engineering tricks meant DeepSeek needed far less computing power. The upshot is that the AI models of the future might not require as many high-end Nvidia chips as investors have been counting on.
上周，深度求索公司发布了一款 AI 模型，其表现似乎与美国 AI 热潮核心企业 OpenAI 的尖端产品旗鼓相当。关键在于：创新的工程技术手段使得深度求索所需的计算能力大幅减少。这意味着，未来的 AI 模型可能不需要投资者所预期的那样多的高端英伟达芯片。

“This is kind of classic in our industry,” Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff said. “The pioneers are not the ones who end up being the victors.”
“这在我们行业里算是经典案例了，”Salesforce 首席执行官马克·贝尼奥夫说。“先驱者未必是最终的胜利者。”

The development turned Wall Street upside down. Nvidia’s stock dropped 17% to its lowest level since October. Chip stocks Broadcom and Micron Technology fell more than 10%. The S&P 500’s technology sector lost 5.6%, its worst one-day decline in more than four years. In all, Monday’s bloodbath wiped out some $1 trillion from the stock market’s value, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
这一发展令华尔街天翻地覆。英伟达的股价下跌了 17%，跌至自十月以来的最低水平。芯片股博通和美光科技的跌幅超过 10%。标普 500 指数的科技板块下跌了 5.6%，创下四年多来最严重的单日跌幅。根据道琼斯市场数据，周一的这场血洗总共抹去了股市约 1 万亿美元的市值。

Chart showing options bets on Nvidia’s stock price rising.

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Leon Cooperman, the billionaire stock picker who founded Omega Family Office, is one of many investors who says the euphoria surrounding the sector reached unsustainable heights.
亿万富翁选股人、欧米茄家族办公室创始人莱昂·库珀曼是众多投资者之一，他表示围绕该行业的狂热情绪已达到不可持续的高度。

“Every third word out of anyone’s mouth was ‘AI,’” Cooperman said. “Everybody was bulled up in the market. If you have a contrarian bone in your body, you have to look the other way.”
“每个人口中每三个词就有一个是‘AI’，”库珀曼说。“每个人都对市场充满信心。如果你骨子里有逆反心理，你就得另辟蹊径。”

The threat to Nvidia is the largest it has faced since sales of its chips skyrocketed during the budding AI boom two years ago. The chip maker booked more than $63 billion in earnings in its last four quarters, making it one of the most profitable companies of all time, and its shares have surged eightfold since the end of 2022.
对英伟达的威胁是自两年前人工智能热潮初现、其芯片销量飙升以来所面临的最大挑战。这家芯片制造商在过去四个季度录得超过 630 亿美元的收益，成为有史以来最赚钱的公司之一，其股价自 2022 年底以来已飙升八倍。

For its part, Nvidia praised DeepSeek’s advancements and pointed to strong future demand for its products. Deploying AI models “requires significant numbers of Nvidia GPUs and high-performance networking,” the company said.
英伟达方面赞扬了深度求索的进步，并指出未来对其产品的强劲需求。该公司表示，部署 AI 模型“需要大量的英伟达 GPU 和高速网络”。

Many investors had latched on to the notion that AI would unleash a wave of productivity in the economy while powering continued profits in a handful of technology giants. Several said Monday’s swoon exposed a deep vulnerability in the market: Many investors had crowded into the exact same AI trade.
许多投资者曾坚信，人工智能将释放经济中的生产力浪潮，同时推动少数科技巨头持续盈利。数位人士表示，周一的暴跌暴露了市场的一个深层次脆弱性：许多投资者都涌入了完全相同的 AI 交易。

“It is difficult to know exactly how to make money on AI,” said Mike Ogborne, founder of Ogborne Capital Management, a hedge-fund firm in San Francisco that oversees a position in Nvidia. “This could be the first day of a lot more pain.”
“很难确切知道如何在人工智能上赚钱，”旧金山对冲基金公司 Ogborne Capital Management 的创始人迈克·奥格伯恩(Mike Ogborne)说，该公司持有英伟达(Nvidia)的头寸。“这可能是更多痛苦的开始。”

Chart shows estimated net inflows to technology funds, yearly

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What is DeepSeek?

DeepSeek is the brainchild of Liang Wenfeng, a Chinese technologist who runs an $8 billion hedge fund called High-Flyer. Wenfeng plunged headlong into the business of advanced AI systems about two years ago when he established DeepSeek and made it his mission to compete with the biggest and most well-funded AI startups in the world.

Until recently, though, DeepSeek went largely below the radar. Executives attended Nvidia’s annual conference in San Jose, and the company was a big early buyer of Nvidia’s chips in China. Even after U.S. export restrictions clamped down on its ability to import Nvidia’s most advanced chips, it bought less-advanced chips the company made specifically for the Chinese market.

The big moment for DeepSeek came with the recent release of its “R1” model, which dazzled many users of its app with its ability to reason through tough problems in ways that rivaled—and some say, surpassed—OpenAI’s capabilities. The company’s app quickly rose to become the most popular on Apple’s iPhone store.

Despite the hype, some chip-industry insiders don’t believe DeepSeek will supplant AI’s incumbents. Photo: Lam Yik/Bloomberg News

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday called R1 “an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price,” in a post on X. He also said it was invigorating to have a new competitor and that his company will move up some of its product releases.

Dan Cleary, a New York-based founder of PromptHub, a startup that helps users improve their queries to AI systems, said he ran DeepSeek’s R1 through its paces by giving it a multistep math problem. DeepSeek solved it in about four minutes—three minutes faster than OpenAI’s o1 took. DeepSeek also showed more of the work it needed to get there.

He then asked DeepSeek to produce an image of a pelican riding a bicycle, and to identify an erroneous phrase (“Dan surfs in Portugal”) he inserted in the text of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby.” It did both well.

“It’s the first really good reasoning model outside of OpenAI” that has been widely released, he said, as well as the first very good model from China. DeepSeek will be made available on PromptHub’s platform in the coming days, he added, tying into the excitement around it.

Despite the hype, some chip-industry insiders don’t believe DeepSeek will supplant AI’s incumbents, or that its claims of needing small amounts of computing power to create powerful AI models means Nvidia’s business is doomed.

Some estimates have posited that DeepSeek needed only around $5 million worth of chips to train one of its earlier models, but that ignores the cost of the research and experimentation that went into its development, Bernstein Research analyst Stacy Rasgon said in a research note. It wasn’t clear how much computing power DeepSeek used for the more advanced R1 model.

Because DeepSeek made its research and results public, other AI companies can also adopt them, potentially paving the way for other models’ improvement rather than posing a direct threat to them.

If DeepSeek indeed delivered its model on the cheap, the disruption to the incumbent AI trade could be profound. But the advance could be good news more broadly, said Joseph Amato, chief investment officer at Neuberger Berman, which manages more than $500 billion.

“If you can invest less for a powerful model that has wider adoption because the costs are lower, that’s got to be a good thing for the broad-based economy, all the companies that are using AI,” he said.

A snowballing trade

The run-up in Nvidia and other AI stocks has been marked by speculation across markets, where big tech companies have never loomed so large.

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Since a blockbuster earnings report from Nvidia in early 2023 floored investors, everyday Americans and big institutional investors alike have piled into artificial-intelligence stocks, vying for a slice of the profits.

U.S. technology mutual and exchange-traded funds attracted $23 billion of net inflows in 2024, the largest annual haul since 2000 around the time the dot-com bubble burst, according to Morningstar Direct data.

And the seven largest companies in the S&P 500 recently made up 34% of the index’s market capitalization, the highest figure on record, according to Goldman Sachs data going back to 1980. Nvidia alone made up 6.8% of the S&P 500 on Friday, up from about 1.1% at the end of 2022, according to Dow Jones Market Data. It contributed almost a quarter of the index’s total return in 2024.

Some investors say the exuberance surrounding the AI trade has simply gone too far and was due for an abrupt reversal, such as the one that rocked markets Monday. They are positioning for the tumult to continue and warning that the crowded trade could continue unraveling.

“It’s a disruption of this whole narrative that this small cohort of companies is going to be controlling AI progress for years and years to come,” said Rob Arnott, founder of asset management firm Research Affiliates, who has been warning about over-exuberance surrounding AI.

Illustration: Rachel Mendelson/WSJ, Bloomberg (3), iStock (3)

The outsize influence of a few big stocks has led some professionals to argue that the group is more vulnerable than ever before.

“When you see these types of levels of concentration, the megacaps, the biggest companies, tend to have a target on their back,” said Michael Reynolds, vice president of investment strategy at Glenmede. “Whether it’s a regulatory target, whether it’s creative destruction as other companies try to take the mantle. I think we’re sort of seeing that happen in practice today.”

While the day’s plunge in Nvidia shares and declines in other tech stocks pulled the S&P 500 sharply lower, a majority of stocks in the index rose for the day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.7%, or about 289 points, as blue-chip stocks from Johnson & Johnson to Apple, Coca-Cola to Nike, rallied.

Worries about a market bubble

Two years of nearly unrelenting stock-market gains have spurred numerous calls that markets are on the verge of a bubble.

One reason? The popularity of speculative exchange-traded funds that use leverage, or borrowed money, to amplify the returns of their underlying assets has exploded. Assets in such funds have grown to $100 billion, from about $60 billion at the end of 2022, according to Morningstar.

Monday’s market action highlighted the perils of holding such funds. A $10 billion Direxion ETF that aims to triple the exposure to an index of chip-makers dropped 23%, wiping out all of its gains since late 2023. And a GraniteShares fund that aims to double the daily return of Nvidia shares plunged 34% in its worst day on record.

The growth of leveraged funds has raised concerns that the funds themselves are contributing to the velocity of moves in the underlying stocks they track. In order to maintain their advertised exposure, the funds become sellers of the stocks they track on down days and buyers on up days when they rebalance.

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The Day DeepSeek Turned Tech and Wall Street Upside Down
DeepSeek 颠覆科技与华尔街的那一天