Nvidia founder and Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang challenged market perceptions about DeepSeek's technological advancements, TechCrunch reported Thursday, arguing that the AI company's developments would boost rather than harm the chipmaker's business prospects.
The R1 open source reasoning model from DeepSeek is "incredibly exciting," Huang said in a pre-recorded interview with DataDirect Networks CEO Alex Bouzari, TechCrunch reported.
"I think the market responded to R1, as in, 'Oh my gosh. AI is finished,'" Huang said, according to TechCrunch. "You know, it dropped out of the sky. We don't need to do any computing anymore. It's exactly the opposite. It's [the] complete opposite."
The developments would accelerate AI adoption rather than eliminate demand for computing resources like those Nvidia produces, Huang explained. He emphasized that post-training would remain computationally demanding despite DeepSeek's advances in pre-training AI models.
"Reasoning is a fairly compute-intensive part of it," Huang noted in the interview.
The comments came nearly a month after DeepSeek's open-source R1 model release triggered market volatility that particularly affected Nvidia. The chipmaker's stock plunged 16.9% in one trading day following DeepSeek's announcement, TechCrunch reported.
Nvidia's share price dropped from $142.62 on January 24 to $118.52 the following Monday, January 27, erasing $600 billion in market value over three days. The stock has since largely recovered, opening at $140 per share on Friday – nearly regaining the lost value within a month.
DeepSeek announced plans Thursday to open source five code repositories as part of an upcoming "open source week" event. Nvidia declined to provide additional comment beyond Huang's interview remarks.
The company is scheduled to report its fourth-quarter earnings on February 26, when it may further address the market's reaction to DeepSeek's developments.
