On Sunday night in Chicago, Steve Quirk by habit checked the S&P 500 futures prices and noted a large fall. The following day, the markets veteran was looking at figures showing a surge in overnight trading on online broker Robinhood as investor darling Nvidia slumped amid worries about Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek.

Nvidia’s travails produced the second-biggest late-night trading session for Robinhood, best known for popularising smartphone-based trading. It has offered overnight dealing for the past 18 months and Monday ranked for volume behind only the night of the US presidential election in November.

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DeepSeek is an artificial intelligence company that specializes in developing large language models and AI applications. Founded in 2023, DeepSeek has quickly gained attention in the AI industry for its innovative approaches to natural language processing and generation.

DeepSeek released its R1 model on January 20, 2025, explaining in a detailed paper how to build a large language model on a very small budget that can learn and improve itself without human supervision. DeepSeek said it had taken only two months and less than $6 million to build a model more advanced than many of its Western competitors. The release astonished Silicon Valley and wiped out $1 trillion in market value from U.S. and European stocks, including Nvidia, on January 27, 2025.

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