Big investors say that the sudden emergence of a cheaper Chinese artificial intelligence model that claims to require less computing power has raised doubts about the long-term growth prospects of high-powered chip manufacturer Nvidia and other American tech giants.

The success of DeepSeek’s platform, known as R1 became widely available at the weekend, pushed Nvidia sharply lower on fears that fewer chips would be needed to train the same complex processes that had made Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Amazon-supported Anthropic the hottest private technology companies in the world last year.