Even if you don't pay much attention to the stock market, chances are you've heard about Nvidia and its share price today.
The company broke the record for the biggest one-day loss in value for a company on the US stock market.
Nvidia's share price dropped by 17 per cent.
This equated to a huge $US593 billion ($948 billion) loss in value — that's nearly $1 trillion in Australian currency.
Here's what you need to know about the company everyone's taking about.
What is Nvidia?
Nvidia is a technology company that makes chips, systems and software that power things like artificial intelligence (AI), gaming and graphics.
It was founded by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993.
At the time, the aim was to "bring 3D graphics to the gaming and multimedia markets".
It invented the world's first graphics processing unit (GPU) in 1999 and moved into AI in 2012.
Nivida, which goes by the a four-letter code NVDA on the stock market, became the world's most valuable company in June last year.
But it hasn't been all smooth sailing.
Nvidia suffered a blow in September, when share prices dropped by 9.5 per cent — at the time, it was the deepest ever single-day decline in market value for a US company.
That was until Monday, when Nvidia broke its own record.
What's the NVDA stock price?
As of the close of trade on the US stock market on January 27, it was $US118.42.
Compare that to just a few weeks ago on January 6, when it was $US149.43 — its highest ever closing price.
When you look at the share price across three months, you'll see it's a pretty significant dip:
Why is Nvidia stock down?
Because of the success of an AI chatbot called DeepSeek that creators claim only used cheaper versions of Nvidia chips.
Chinese tech startup DeepSeek was founded in 2023 and touted its chatbot as being just as good as ChatGPT — but free.
Last week, a research paper was published about DeepSeek's new model called R1 that said it had advanced "reasoning" skills.
The kicker was that this model was supposedly created using an earlier, less advanced versions of Nvidia chips.
While this claim has been disputed, it still made people wonder how much of a threat this would pose to Nvidia.
That's because the paper claimed DeepSeek only spent $US6 million to make it, which is really, really cheap compared to what other AI companies spend.
For context, analysts estimate that big US companies will spend $US250 billion this year on AI infrastructure.
So this lead people to question if Nvidia would keep making as much money as it had been.
This set the wheels in motion for panic among investors, but it wasn't until DeepSeek surged to the top of Apple's app store on Monday that things really took off.
Investors started selling their shares and, by the time the US stock market closed, close to $US600 billion had been wiped off the company's market capitalisation or "market cap" — which is the total value of a public company's stock currently held by all its shareholders.
At closing, the price of one Nvidia share was $US24.20, or 17 per cent, lower.
How bad is this for Nvidia?
Obviously losing nearly $US600 billion isn't ideal for any company.
But it's worth noting that the stock price for the company is still pretty high.
Have a look at this chart, showing the growth of Nvidia's share prices across the past year:
You'll see that, even with Monday's losses, it's still worth more than it was last January.
On January 29 last year, it was only worth $US62.47 — a little more than half of what it's worth today.
And now look at its growth since 2013:
Nvidia was worth just $US14.32 at the start of 2023, so it's still up by more than 700 per cent in less than two years.
It has added more than $US100 to its share price in that time.
ABC North America correspondent Carrington Clarke suggests we could be in for a waiting game to see how this pans out for Nvidia.
"Often we see in markets when new information is being divested, the immediate concern is perhaps panic," he says.
"The concern [is] that lofty expectations about future profits were not based on firm ground.
"We [will] wait to see how this is processed.
"Nvidia has a history of seeing major sell-offs and then rising again."
Take, for example, the September drop — share prices got down to $US102.83 at its lowest point on September 6.
A month later, the price had gone up to $US124.92.
